cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/361524
If you are browsing through https://kbin.social/ or whatever just click on “more” then activity.
There you’ll see info like boosts, reduces (downvotes), and favorites (upvotes?)
Works with all instances for lemmy or kbin material
This is something of a ticking time bomb, I think. I don’t think the majority of people coming to Lemmy right now appreciate that their votes are public, and sooner or later somebody is going to write a bot or addon that uses that data to harass or censor users and it’s going to be a scandal that scares people away.
Making votes public is a really bad idea because it disincentivizes users to vote how they like, for fear of reprisal. This is quintessential to a democratic system, and to a social media platform.
You want this place to grow, and order for it to grow, users have to interact. They are the engine behind the content aggregation, they should never feel hesitation to vote.
I couldn’t have said it better myself. Voting secrecy is very important. There’s a reason why your government ballot isn’t posted on some public bulletin board in the town square for everyone to see. I see no reason why it should be any different for online community voting.
For me personally, I am somewhat okay with Lemmy’s implementation because it isn’t so public for the average user and is understandable given the requirements of federation (at least until we figure out a way to anonymize vote counts in aggregate), but kbin’s implementation just crosses the line IMHO.
Here’s an example of what I think we’ll be seeing more of: A user getting called out and named for frequently downvoting: https://kbin.social/m/wholesome/t/80838/To-the-one-guy-who-keeps-downvoting-m-wholesome-threads
Don’t think this is the last we’ll see of this, and I think it definitely has the potential to impact peoples participation in the long run, with people self-censoring themselves out of fear of being called out for voting wrong.
But vote secrecy is difficult to implement with federated systems like these when the votes need to be federated between instances.
People will always be able to get the “raw” ActivityPub data anyhow to see who voted what, unless there’s a major rewrite of how voting works, I believe. I’m not an expert in ActivityPub/Fediverse, though…
I didn’t even realize votes are public here. On Reddit I’ve got that shit hidden because it’s extremely personal data. Just through upvote/downvote patterns you can figure out what someone’s likely political beliefs are, how religious they are, what their hobbies are, what disgusts them, what arouses them, what they find offensive…
It’s genuinely insane that this stuff is public at all. I’m probably gonna stop using Lemmy because that shit being public is just way too dangerous imo, and I don’t trust myself enough to not participate if I keep coming back.
If only reddit didn’t commit seppeku, then I’d never have even considered something so poorly thought out.