Fact is, the Lemmy ecosystem needs money to handle the growing server reqirements as more people migrate as well as the development cost of new features (I know Lemmy is OSS but the devs should still get some compensation for their effort).

Seeing how much some reddit users love awards so much that they cant stop giving money to Reddit to award posts protesting the api change, this could be a great way for users to voluntary support the ecosystem. It can be easily ignored by users not caring about them (clients could even add an option to hide them), but users liking the feature can go wild and this time the money goes to volunteers keeping this alive instead of greedy admins, power mods and investors.

Though there would be some big organization questions attached: attached:

  • Which server handles the payment? A centralized one, the one where the post was made or the one where the user giving the award account was created.
  • How will the money be shared between the Devs and the individual instances in a way that is fair but cant be abused easily.
  • Coelacanth
    2•1 year ago

    The downvote was still linked to your account, just obscured; Reddit admins could certainly see what you downvoted.

    Well yes of course, I have never assumed otherwise, and this was never about that.

    The truly dedicated can’t be stopped, but most people aren’t going to spin up their own instance to check who downvoted them. So you end up reducing the potential amount of harassment.

    I still don’t feel like I understand the benefits from easy access to voting info. The downside is that it makes life easy for trolls, stalkers and people of that nature. What’s the upside?

    • effingjoe
      2•1 year ago

      All it takes is one person to spin up one instance.

      You never actually showed how it made life easier for trolls and stalkers.

      • Coelacanth
        2•1 year ago

        I’m just looking to understand the benefits of completely transparent public voting so I can weigh them against the downsides. That’s how I like to form - or change - opinions.

        Saying that trying to hide voting data is meaningless because it’s impossible to hide completely anyway does not answer why public votes are good, it just tries to invalidate the question.

        I’m looking for the completion of the sentence “I like that everyone is able to see who up/downvotes them because __”

        You never actually showed how it made life easier for trolls and stalkers.

        Let’s say I browse a news or politics related community on /New. Someone publishes an incendiary post that nevertheless skirts the rules such that it isn’t within the grounds to report. I downvote it because it’s not the type of content I want on that community. That person spends a single mouseclick to find me and sends me a hostile DM and/or goes and retaliation-downvotes everything on my profile. It’s not a difficult situation to imagine.

        • effingjoe
          3•1 year ago

          You can’t hand wave away the technical limitations like that. If you want downvotes, and you appear to want them, and you want to be on a federated system, and it appears you do, then the federation will require linking downvotes to users.

          Downvotes aren’t an outwardly anonymous way to show disagreement like they were used on Reddit. They’re like a comment of disagreement. If someone harasses you for downvotes, report them. And block them. Just as you would if they did so for a comment you left.

          I like that voting is public because it makes voting (up or down) a public statement. If I look at a person’s voting history and see upvotes on racist comments and downvotes of well thought out comments I can know with some certainty that I can disregard the opinions of that person. Further, it might make people more thoughtful about what they vote on.

          • Coelacanth
            2•1 year ago

            You can’t hand wave away the technical limitations like that. If you want downvotes, and you appear to want them, and you want to be on a federated system, and it appears you do, then the federation will require linking downvotes to users.

            Well yes. They can still be made more or less easily accessible.

            I like that voting is public because it makes voting (up or down) a public statement. If I look at a person’s voting history and see upvotes on racist comments and downvotes of well thought out comments I can know with some certainty that I can disregard the opinions of that person. Further, it might make people more thoughtful about what they vote on.

            That’s what I was looking for, thank you. I can definitely understand that perspective.

            I definitely hope I’m wrong and this won’t be an issue as Kbin grows its user base.

            • effingjoe
              2•1 year ago

              Well yes. They can still be made more or less easily accessible.

              Only on a server by server basis. The data is being transmitted and received. If a server decides to hide that info, that doesn’t necessarily mean that other ActivityPub compatible services will also hide it, let alone services running the same software.

              You just need to get used to the idea that a vote is as much a pubic statement as a comment, and act accordingly.