subignition

Oh okay, if it’s not a pun then it is a typo. I wasn’t referring to the British spelling, the “e” should be an “a”: “Deredicalisation”

Is “Deredicalisation” intended? I’m not sure if it’s a bit of a play on words or if it’s a typo.

I have to disagree. It should not be a consequential or self-conscious act if you aren’t using your real identity. (If you are, the expectation that you should be very careful with how you participate remains unchanged. This isn’t LinkedIn and it shouldn’t be trying to be.)

Commenters on the GitHub issue have put it better than I can:

An average user absolutely benefits from being able to see who voted on a post or comment and what their vote was. A person noticing that someone is actively down voting their content in a deliberate way empowers the user to have it dealt with. Mods might not [cue in to] that kind of targeted harassment.

Your vote isn’t private in either case regardless. At most you need to know someone’s birthday, first name, and last name to find someone’s voting record in America (might depend state by state). Someone willing to set up a Lemmy instance to see your votes is also capable of then setting up bots to specifically target you with down votes, which is the more egregious of the two actions.

People who use the fediverse need to get used to the fact that things are not private here, that’s the point of interoperability, trying to convince them that they have fake privacy is just going to make them feel self entitled and violated when they learn that nothing here is really private, which shouldn’t really be expected as it is a public and decentralized forum.

I don’t think users are done any favours by pretending they are private as bad actors can already do whatever odious crap they want to and it leads people into a false sense of security. For example someone liking controversial content on an account which can be traced to an identity they may need to keep separate is already taking a massive risk under a false assumption of privacy.

I’d be curious to know where that expectation is coming from. On average I’d expect a majority of folks have that expectation carried over from Reddit. Another poster somewhere mentioned that there are several other social media platforms that don’t have private voting, and I wonder if the expectations would be different from people who came from those.

Personally I think the transparency on votes here has been refreshing and am sad to see platforms pushing to make it private. But then, I grew up in a time before Facebook, when it was understood that you used a pseudonym, not your real identity, and needed to be careful about what you chose to share on the Internet. If you had concerns about being judged for a specific opinion or a hobby or whatever, you could just make a separate account for those topics. Kind of like how some folks only keep a Reddit account around these days for porn.

All you need to do is look at the post from a federated instance running software that doesn’t hide the information. Here is a link to your post from my instance, which shows upvote info: https://fedia.io/m/fediverse@lemmy.world/t/1097629/Lemmy-devs-are-considering-making-all-votes-public-have-your/comment/6869259/favourites

To view down votes, they might need to host their own instance? I don’t know offhand of another software that shows downvote information, but even though Mbin does not show it, I think it should still be accessible if you’re running the instance yourself and looking directly at the database.

Looks like you hit the wrong reply button and your post got disconnected from the thread.

That’s something you just made up so that you could give your little speech.

That’s a gross assumption of bad faith on your part. I pointed out that you would still have the same tools that you already have available for any types of harassment that may already occur.

I’m pointing out that it’s very strange that when I bring up away this is going to obviously be abused pure knee-jerk reaction is to say ’ why didn’t you just block them’ as if it’s already happened.

I said that because, as you might have already learned from elsewhere in this thread, voting information is already public and any “annoying neckbeard” that was too-interested in you can just view your post from any other instance running software that displays those details. It can already happen, but I’m glad that it sounds like it hasn’t happened to you.

Now to the matter at hand… What is the point of this? Why do users need this information?

I explained why I think it could be beneficial in another comment in the original conversation. Another user pointed out that I was overlooking your concerns that there would be an increase in harassment due to the increased ease of access to the information. That’s a fair point which I had not fully taken into account, because as I said above, the potential for a bad actor to access that information is already there because of how ActivityPub works.

Since my original replies I have since found a post about PieFed adding experimental private voting to their ActivityPub implementation. You might be interested in reading more or trying that instance out for a while because of your concerns around public votes.

Having your Google Accounts linked to your phone is the same as being logged into them at all times. I believe the person you’re replying to might not use Google Account integration.

Very interesting development, I’ll be curious to see how it ends up working out.

It does look like your instance’s mod log anonymizes all actions, at least the first couple pages I skimmed seemed to be that way.

I’m not sure if that’s a Lemmy thing in general or if it’s something lemmy.today has configured. On my instance, which runs Mbin, the moderation log looks like it has the option to anonymize the mod name (which I think is new since last I checked), but that isn’t being used universally.

I can see the logic in that. I feel like the easier it is for someone to misbehave, the more quickly they’ll be weeded out from a community, but I agree that there might be an increase in the effort required by individual users because of something like this.

Okay, well, what are your expectations for an (edit: public) online space? What makes blocking unreasonable people an unreasonable option for you?

To be clear, I’m not trying to lay the responsibility exclusively on users here. Trolls and agitators have been around as long as the Internet has. But moderators are volunteers and don’t have the bandwidth to diligently police their spaces 100% of the time.

Reputation, whether informed by a voting system or not, has always been an important component of excluding bad behavior in pseudonymous communities. I don’t think it is a reasonable expectation that you can participate in a space without spending any effort in keeping it clean for yourself and others (not that I think your position is necessarily that severe.) Reporting bad behavior should be the minimum expectation, and I see the block list as a fallback for when moderation efforts are insufficient or don’t align well with the user’s expectations.

I think that comment you quoted is actually mine, haha.

Yeah it’s a mild curiosity for me. It’s fairly rare that my posts get more than one downvote, but it is very common for my posts to get exactly one. I’m sure it is just my brain doing its thing and constantly looking for patterns that has me wondering if it’s largely the same person in the first place. You’re probably right that it is not coordinated or malicious, and I don’t really suspect that it is.

I would definitely not be messaging anybody to ask why I’m being downvoted; personally it doesn’t bother me because of course not everyone is going to agree with what I have to say. But I do acknowledge that there is greater potential for that to happen at scale if votes are totally public for everyone.

Edit: And I am not claiming to be perfect myself either. There were certainly a couple users who I have consistently downvoted for what I have seen as bad faith participation. One of those users has mellowed out a lot over time and only rarely gets a downvote from me these days; the other slowly ramped it up until I decided they were worth blocking. I try not to reflexively downvote comments I simply disagree with, but I’m definitely guilty of leaving a downvote in lieu of having the energy to respond with push back to something disingenuous.

That is excellent behavioral information to have when deciding whether one’s instance should stay federated with those admins, for what it’s worth.

Remember, you are giving this info to everyone. Mark Zuckerberg will be able to see what you like and dislike in all public votes.

ActivityPub is designed to be public though. Lemmy’s current choice not to display the details of voting information does not prevent Zuckerberg or anyone else running a compatible instance from receiving all those details and looking at them.

As an aside, I currently prefer mbin’s style of keeping the vote totals separate. I think it provides more useful context to be able to tell the difference between a post with 0 upvotes and 5 downvotes, and a post with 35 upvotes and 40 downvotes, rather than having them both display -5.

Also, not sure if this is different on Lemmy, but a fresh post is at 0/0, it does not start off with an upvote from the user who posted it. I kind of like that, but I’m not sure how much it matters

How are harassing comments you could receive about your voting choices much different than harassing comments you could receive about the comments you make? Serious question. My instance only shows details on upvotes and not downvotes, but because the information is already public due to the ActivityPub protocol, it’s already possible (albeit taking some effort) for anyone motivated to look at those details.

In both cases, it could reach the level of moderation actions against the offending user, but if vote details are hidden then you also lose the ability as a user to notice when (for example) people or bots are following you around and downvoting all your comments indiscriminately. While moderators and admins can still look into those things currently, I feel like moderation bandwidth is already slightly strained in the Fediverse, and relying on moderator efforts to catch that kind of behavior is going to be less reliable than noticing and flagging it yourself.

If you are particularly concerned that you’re going to be identified IRL based on your participation online, you should be changing your identity frequently rather than using the same account for a year+.

Throwaways / burner accounts remain a thing that are available for both positive and negative use cases.

In case you’re not aware, all your activity via the ActivityPub protocol is already public - it’s just that the details are hidden by some front ends. It is already possible for anyone motivated to check your post from a federated instance that displays full vote details, or to host their own instance and receive the raw voting information from places they’re federated with.

Yes, you can have communities with higher moderation standards, Beehaw is a great example – but those are local moderation standards, it does not stop the general public from seeing what’s going on as onlookers.

IMO it’s no different than most message boards in the earlier days of the Internet. You are pseudonymous, not anonymous, and when you consistently participate on an account, that identity is going to develop a reputation based on how you participate. Upvotes and downvotes just cut down on the kind of low-effort “this”, “love this post”, “fukkk u omg” replies that would add noise to threads in those days.

Moderation logs are already public.

Standard disclaimer that you’re gonna find objectionable content in there, browse at your own peril.

On your instance it can be found here: https://lemmy.today/modlog

Lemmy was never designed to be private in that way, nor was ActivityPub. You should expect the things you post publicly on the Internet to be public.

You should be reporting and then blocking a user that harasses you in that manner. Those tools are available to you for a reason.