Edit: obligatory explanation (thanks mods for squaring me away)…

What you see via the UI isn’t “all that exists”. Unlike Reddit, where everything is a black box, there are a lot more eyeballs who can see “under the hood”. Any instance admin, proper or rogue, gets a ton of information that users won’t normally see. The attached example demonstrates that while users will only see upvote/downvote tallies, admins can see who actually performed those actions.

Edit: To clarify, not just YOUR instance admin gets this info. This is ANY instance admin across the Fediverse.

  • HTTP_404_NotFoundEnglish
    2•1 year ago

    Sounds to me like they are trying to make scapegoats for looking at illicit content.

    • @vinnymacEnglish
      1•1 year ago

      You’re reading too much into my comment.

      I am a software engineer, and am always thinking of user experiences in my day job. This is simply the scenario that popped into my mind, but many do exist.

      Besides hacking, phishing scams, and pranks. Users trick others all the time into viewing content they didn’t mean to view.

      My concern isn’t so much that this can happen at all, but rather that if views were public, how it’d be trivial to write software that auto bans users based on those views. Without great moderation tools, and petitioning it wouldn’t scale well.

      • HTTP_404_NotFoundEnglish
        1•1 year ago

        E.g. someone using your account to view illegal content in a community you are not a member of, and you being held accountable

        I may have replied to the incorrect content, but, I meant to reply to this one above.