I think that regular users don't really care, why would anyone obsess about tracking down which account liked which post? the only people who get into that sort of thing, are people who likely manipulate with multiple accounts themselves. and they don't wanna be traceable and that's why they're afraid of this feature.
this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2023
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why would anyone obsess about tracking down which account liked which post?
Normal people wouldn't. Unfortunately, there are a lot of assholes, stalkers, and people who are salty they got downvoted and want revenge.
Ever seen people on Reddit say "Whoever downvoted this, go fuck yourselves?" I can guarantee that, if they knew who downvoted them, they wouldn't keep their reaction contained to an edited comment.
That’s a fair point. But there are people who live in situations where such activity has legal/societal implications.
Think some countries that put people to death for blasphemy or people in the states who associate being transgender with being literal child molesters.
Sure keep your account private but that isn’t always feasible even if you try. We see people get doxxed even from innocuous breadcrumbs of statements made over time.
Or don’t favorite/upvote and yet it’s easy to inadvertently do so which can be an issue.
That’s why I’m for a way to handle it, if possible, that minimizes the bad actors. And if not possible then it needs to be really really clear.
Like “upvote” is followed by something that succinctly notes “Favorite saved and ready to share across the fediverse”
I disagree wholeheartedly.
Having your voting history public also constrains people from participating in the community if the things they support or object to would cause harassment or harm from people who know who they are, which is not always preventable, for example a shared household, using kbin from work (activity monitored), etc...
I could easily see an Amazon worker getting fired because they were logged upvoting pro-union threads. They wouldn't even need to be doing this from a company network - just accessing kbin once on their network for any reason would have their user name associated with them, and then Amazon can simply monitor their activity on kbin even when they are using it from home.
Look at everything Amazon has done to their workers and tell me that this isn't a believable scenario. And that's just one example.
Having votes public can cause real harm to people.
if the things they support or object to would cause harassment or harm from people who know who they are
I could easily see an Amazon worker getting fired because they were logged upvoting pro-union threads.
This prompts two thoughts for me.
First - what you're describing is just the generalised version of having the identity behind your account known. In your example, upvotes and downvotes don't need to be visible in order for Amazon to see your comments on pro-union threads; and I think comments, rather than votes, are far more likely to be used against an employee in this way.
Second - I think what you're describing exposes the question of what downvotes actually are, because I don't think they can always be interpreted as showing support or objection. My understanding is that on Reddit, as a social news aggregator, upvotes and downvotes were originally a mechanism for deciding whether the content of a link was relevant and interesting to the sub, or irrelevant and boring - it was all tied to the algorithm as a way of pushing interesting content up the page. But at some point, as Reddit grew, that morphed into using upvotes and downvotes to agree or disagree with opinions (especially political opinions) being expressed.
I'm okay with 'upvote to agree', but I still find this use of the downvote button in the comment section is troubling, and my hope is that Reddit's 'downvote to disagree' culture doesn't carry over to kbin and Lemmy.
The other day I was having a perfectly civilised discussion with someone on one of the UK communities about one aspect of health policy (whether England should follow Wales and Scotland's path of extending free prescriptions to people on very high incomes in the name of universality, or whether England was right to focus its health budget on other health priorities like GP availability or surgery waiting lists). The discussion was perfectly polite yet the other person was downvoting each of my responses - they probably didn't realise I could see this and I didn't call them out on it. It made me wonder about their thought process though - we were having a good discussion, neither of us was being rude or insulting, and yet each time I took the time to respond to them, they just reflexively downvoted me before responding themselves. That struck me as poor etiquette in a conversation - one of those toxic features of anonymous online interactions that few people would try to replicate in real life.
My hope is that 'downvote to disagree' doesn't take hold here in the way it did on Reddit, and that visible downvotes will encourage a bit more trigger discipline around the downvote button. Downvote when there's cause - material that's not relevant to the sub, or that's low quality / low effort, or people behaving in a way that's rude or insulting or aggressive or trolling - and be prepared to justify your downvotes if needed. The culture here can better than what Reddit became.
I think it's more accurate to say that up/downvoting is used as like/dislike, with disagreement being a special case of dislike.
But like it or not, you will never get rid of that association because it's the simplest and most direct interpretation of an up/down vote. It's just psychology.
Also keep in mind that your feelings on what up/downvoting should mean is really more appropriate at the comment level, whereas, having them represent like/dislike is notably more appropriate at the thread/post level - as the idea for a sub/magazine is that content users like should be promoted and content they don't want to see should be demoted.
Unfortunately, that makes it even more difficult because now you would want the arrows to mean different things depending on the area they are used.
The end result is that you will never break the link between voting and people interpreting it as like/dislike. It's the appropriate interpretation for threads/posts, and it then becomes the simplest interpretation for comments as well.
What you can do is have a separate control to indicate whether a comment is appropriate or not. However, you would still run the risk of people weaponizing it against comments they particularly dislike, so I'm not sure whether it would be worth the effort to implement.
I tend to agree. I don't think any of that activity should be public. It doesn't really serve a purpose anyway, and it is an easy metric to scrape for data collection on users...
Hopefully there might be an option to keep this sort of thing private in account settings soon. Reddit let you choose what account activity is publicly visible, and I see no reason why Lemmy shouldn't have this feature, as well.
Good discussion, there. I like the idea of allowing it to be set per instance; while it doesn't hide the votes from admins, changing the in-instance presentation of the data does allow an instance to customize the "feel" of the instance... much like Beehaw chooses not to use downvotes at all.
I'm on the fence re displaying them. I use the downvotes activity to search for bots / astroturfers and it DOES allow identification of bigots who downvote for that reason, but it also does provide a means of harassing someone for a downvote.
Really, a cultural shift from "Downvote = disagree" to "Downvote =Anti-factual, low effort, or bot" is needed.
Maybe making upvotes counter downvotes is a decent start? Right now, kbin is weighted toward downvotes; some users with thousands of upvotes and hundreds of downvotes are sitting in the negatives.
I've had some time to think about it and I think I actually like the current setup. "Boost" provides more visibility to a post, while "upvote" and "downvote" is synonymous with agree/disagree.
In a way, I can disagree with someone AND boost it. Disagreeing with someone doesn't have to be hostile. I think it would be healthy if a community could disagree with each other in a civil manner.
I also like that if someone disagrees, that person cannot influence if the post gets less visibility.
Except downvoting does reduce content's visibility, and people are downvoting content that they don't really have anything to do with because it shows up in their All feed. Certain niche magazines and magazines for vulnerable communities are at risk of vote bullying in the current system.
Kbin uses boosts as upvotes for their karma calculation, which is why you see the QI style scoring. Strange system.
Yeah, that I get... it's just not intuitive for users. If downvote = -1 rep, then most people are going to assume that upvote = +1 rep, with boost being something like a "look at this post" option. But maybe that's just me?
I agree with you. It doesn't make sense to me. If it was me it would be =If(or(boost=1,upvote=1), karma=karma+1,karma=karma)
Yeah, this is a consequence of recent changes. It has already been fixed on the test instances. The changes will soon be implemented on kbin.social
You're the programming man!
This is bug. It's fixed in dev. Shortly before the great migration started a change was made to bring kbin in line with lemmy but the bit that calculated the "karma" was missed and so it still uses boosts.
Not that I agree with the concept of karma.
Though I was skeptical at first, I much prefer the "positive votes only" style that some Lemmy instances use. If you don't have anything nice to say, etc etc etc. Downvotes, at least, seem to suppress peoples' willingness to discuss controversial opinions.
I understand, but it also makes it a lot more difficult to quickly make trolling and spam disappear.
I see that ActivityPub makes it hard to do it and if it can’t be done then it should be visible (so people can know and act accordingly)
The only “alternative” approach I can see would be to have a per instance account that is given the activity (say upvote/downvote)
So… let’s say I’m on kbin.social and upvote this comment.
Kbin.social knowing me (since it’s my account) logs the upvote but does so as if single_instance_system_account@kbin.social did the upvote.
That is then what is replicated across the fediverse.
I assume that breaks the “intent” of the protocol and could be an issue but does let other instances decide to filter out that activity (if they decide to do so) by having some attribute or flag that denotes that this “account” is the fediverse instance account (e.g. not a user).
Boosts, however, should be shared since it’s like a retweet/shout out and are meant to be shared.
Of course that means I can no longer see my own upvote/downvote activity.
If that was also wanted then you could add a table that basically logs that but isn’t federated. E.g. a local instance reference that can be used for that instance to show the activity.
This way there’s less chance of an issue of somebody knowing a users account seeing activity like this:
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A man, say in Iran, upvoted something about the prophet that somebody else found disrespectful
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A christian teen upvoted something about atheism.
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A woman reading about how to leave a domestic abuse situation.
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Somebody curious about transgender reassignment
Either there needs to be a way to minimize the risks of such activity being seen/shared across the fediverse or it needs to be very very clear that even if you don’t see it that what you do is shouted across the fediverse and that others can and will be able to see it.
So what happens with 300 people downvote a post and 500 upvote it? For that to work you'd need an 'account' per post/vote/user combination. Now your instance has 1000's of bot accounts that are now indistinguishable from bad vote manipulation.
ActivityPub broadcasts all these activity types. It's how it works. You can't federate these things without, well, federating them.
Yeah. Because each instance would have a record of that but there’s nothing to stop a bad actor from doing that on one instance and federating that out.
Of course a bad actor can set up their own instance and just create thousands of fake bot accounts and do the same.
Edit: The more I think about it @VerifiablyMrWonka the only way to do it would be to have some kind of activitypub transaction that is flagged as an instances reputation.
E.g. it’s the same as using the per instance account but it allows you to say “here’s how kbin.social” calculated the reputation/weight of this item.
And then each instance can opt to include that or not as they see fit. Maybe they federate with all instances but only show the weight/reputation “favorites”/“reduce” from those that they trust to maintain that info. Lemmy.world, sure, but the new instances such as haxor.1488.de.feder.at yeah… that’s probably a no so by default all of those don’t show/include in that instances feed.
Of course a bad actor can set up their own instance and just create thousands of fake bot accounts and do the same.
A competent admin would then just defederate from them. Easy. But now throw in that all kbin instances look like bot fests and what do you do? Maybe what lemmy.ml have done and just block kbin useragents at the firewall.
Having an aggregate account that just sends totals could work, but then vote brigading just became even easier. What's that aggregate bot? Did you just send a vote ratio of 300:1.9k for this comment? Lovely.
It's a very hard problem to solve and I'm not sure it's doable. The only thing keeping ActivityPub together is the fact that it's so transparent and bad actors are easily spotted and blocked. As soon as you muddy the waters the primary benefactor is the bad person.
It's not great, tbh. People just want to lurk, not potentially get shit on for what they're boosting.
I agree it's an odd choice. I had someone I don't know reduce my post and all my comments about becoming a dad. It's been a hard choice to not go and reduce all of their stuff in return ¯\(ツ)/¯ which I guess is why is a bad idea.
Alternatively, it's a good exercise in self-control and learning to ignore dumb petty things that don't matter. As I understand, there's something of a technical limitation; here due to the way the Fediverse works, that activity necessarily must be public in order to be federated. While Kbin could choose to simply not display the data, it would still be available if you or anyone else wanted to access it.
I'm still new to all this, but I read that kbin federates who is voting, and Lemmy federates only the total votes.
EDIT: So it looks like it is not true. Testing this is tricky due to overload issues, but upvoting myself from a Lemmy account does show an increase but confusingly lists the account under the 'Favourites' activity.
I think there's something to be said for it being public. If someone's downvoting all of your content for no reason without engaging with it, that's obviously not someone worth your time and it may be a decent idea to just block them. I could also imagine some communities making it explicitly against the rules to downvote constructive comments for no reason, for instance.
At any rate, my understanding is that the actions must be at least publicly accessible in order for federation to work, so the only thing that Kbin could do is simply not openly display that data. Perhaps making it less accessible would reduce the temptation to look, but it'll always be available to anyone who truly wants to see.
Yes, on par I lean towards it being a good thing as publicly available information rather than shadowy mud-slinging. I had one post downvoted by someone who apparently has done nothing else before or since, which takes a bit of the sting out of it. There will probably be debates about it at some point, and probably the occasional tit-for-tat attacks around the place, but overall I think it does link a bit more identity to the person who does the up- or down-voting which creates more of a community feel instead of hiding behind total anonymity.
This may be a really dumb idea, but since the data is already publicly available and easily viewable on kbin what about going a step further and require or at least make it possible to attach reason to the upvote/downvote? A lot of the times people don't have the same standard and common understanding of why other people up/downvote. This could perhaps keep it more civil and make the votes more meaningful. It could possibly discourage people from mass downvoting spree or discourage trolls.
Yep, I already noticed a few people downvoting a full page of my comments, even when I post some neutral stuff like bash code for mounting stuff on ubuntu. It didn't work on reddit but here it does. I did the test with someone pointing at my reputation, I was able to grind like 40 reputation from him by simply downvoting everything he said in comments.
The problem is not just the number, it's the impression that other people will get from your post. It will induce confusion and misinterpretation.
Also, the content you write is duplicated around instances, so there is no deletion possible of your content "a la reddit". Once you write something it's duplicated elsewhere and you won't have jurisdiction there. So if you ever get doxxed it's over, so careful with what you write.
Are edits transferred to other instances? I would imagine so.
No guarantee they get the edits. Plus every instance can store older versions if they want and provide a 'edit history', whether that's a part of the current protocol or not it is technically possible.
Just like how someone can archive anything on the internet really.
People should consider everything they do online to be public and trackable. If anonymity is important, it requires direct planning and effort to achieve. Data processing is so powerful and only getting stronger. Companies can learn more about you than you'd think without ever having access to your "PII".
Meh. I don't really think this is a big issue. But my attitude to privacy is ... non-standard.
It is interesting. It might even help negate hivemind behaviour because your name is tied to your actions.
It's worth experimenting with.
Over on Reddit, the RES extension keeps track of who you upvote and downvote and will display a little indicator next to their username telling you the tally of your personal upvote/downvote total for him. I rarely ever remembered people by name, but it was notable to me when I'm reading through a thread and see someone flagged [+100] or whatever.
With the Fediverse, you could actually flag users with two values - your total upvote/downvotes for him, and his total upvote/downvotes for you. That'd be interesting to see.
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