this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2025
419 points (80.7% liked)

You Should Know

40438 readers
176 users here now

YSK - for all the things that can make your life easier!

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must begin with YSK.

All posts must begin with YSK. If you're a Mastodon user, then include YSK after @youshouldknow. This is a community to share tips and tricks that will help you improve your life.



Rule 2- Your post body text must include the reason "Why" YSK:

**In your post's text body, you must include the reason "Why" YSK: It’s helpful for readability, and informs readers about the importance of the content. **



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Posts and comments which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding non-YSK posts.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-YSK posts using the [META] tag on your post title.



Rule 7- You can't harass or disturb other members.

If you harass or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

If you are a member, sympathizer or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.

For further explanation, clarification and feedback about this rule, you may follow this link.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- The majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.

Unless included in our Whitelist for Bots, your bot will not be allowed to participate in this community. To have your bot whitelisted, please contact the moderators for a short review.



Rule 11- Posts must actually be true: Disiniformation, trolling, and being misleading will not be tolerated. Repeated or egregious attempts will earn you a ban. This also applies to filing reports: If you continually file false reports YOU WILL BE BANNED! We can see who reports what, and shenanigans will not be tolerated.

If you file a report, include what specific rule is being violated and how.



Partnered Communities:

You can view our partnered communities list by following this link. To partner with our community and be included, you are free to message the moderators or comment on a pinned post.

Community Moderation

For inquiry on becoming a moderator of this community, you may comment on the pinned post of the time, or simply shoot a message to the current moderators.

Credits

Our icon(masterpiece) was made by @clen15!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

I recently learned that voting on lemmy is not anonymous. Anyone can get information about who has upvoted and downvoted a post or comment.

In combination with your IP, this is a massive privacy (maybe even physical security) risk. Also, people can target you for your votes.

Sadly, this is something where I would prefer Reddit over Lemmy. Big tech scrapes data from both places anyways, at least Reddit is safe.

top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] Dholi@lemmy.ca 36 points 3 days ago (3 children)

at least Reddit is safe.

Lmao, what!? Reddit tries their best to know exactly who you are, where you live, your education, where you work, etc... And then they sell that data to anyone.

load more comments (3 replies)
[–] socsa@piefed.social 21 points 3 days ago (8 children)

A lot of people here still refuse to understand that Lemmy, as it currently exists, is a privacy nightmare, and the voting thing is just the top of the iceberg. There are several de-anonymization attacks possible involving dynamically serving different content to different users. This, combined with the public voting makes it possible that someone can dox an account and expose a lot more information than other forums where that information is more private.

Public votes also open the fediverse up to much worse astroturfing IMO. It's incredible feedback for bots and trolls to see exactly who is interacting with their posts and comments. It's frustrating that a bunch of people here have convinced themselves of the opposite, and insist that public voting is the only way to combat brigades and trolls, which is an incredibly shortsighted stance which doesn't scale nearly as well as it does in the other direction.

[–] TriflingToad@sh.itjust.works 13 points 3 days ago

iirc someone got banned from like 25 subs because they downvoted a single post that said "I want YOU to generate more AI slop" and the mod got pissed and power tripped super hard

load more comments (7 replies)
[–] Vanilla_PuddinFudge@infosec.pub 22 points 3 days ago (15 children)
load more comments (15 replies)
[–] Luci@lemmy.ca 15 points 3 days ago

I’ll downvote everyone here if I damn well please it!!!

[–] jeena@piefed.jeena.net 179 points 5 days ago (84 children)

Why is public voting a massive privacy and physical threat but public posting and commenting is not?

[–] Azzu@lemmy.dbzer0.com 83 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (36 children)

Would be my question as well. It seems quite obvious that if you participate in publicly viewable discussion, that the stuff you do is publicly viewable.

If you don't want it associated to your physical person, use a VPN and unidentifiable account name.

(And the statement "at least reddit is safe" seems absolutely ridiculous to me.)

load more comments (36 replies)
load more comments (83 replies)
[–] discosnails@lemmy.wtf 8 points 3 days ago

I was unaware that it was unclear to anyone but children and the intellectually behind that anything you do on the Internet is traceable to you without significant countermeasures.

[–] TrickDacy@lemmy.world 97 points 4 days ago (11 children)

Why are you saying IP addresses are publicly shown here and why is (almost) no one correcting you? That would've been an enormous privacy risk that would've required intentionally fucking users over. Just doesn't even make sense to write what you did about IP addresses. Seems like you're just hoping to cause some panic.

load more comments (11 replies)
[–] Xylight@lemdro.id 22 points 4 days ago (1 children)

If you're an instance admin, for any post, you can just click "view votes" and see everything tied to usernames, even outside your own instance. Moderators can too, but it's restricted to the communities they moderate.

[–] moseschrute@lemmy.zip 9 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

So if a bad actor wanted to get aces to vote data, they could setup and instance and have it federate with any instance they want to extract voting data from?

[–] Xylight@lemdro.id 10 points 3 days ago

Yes, it's very simple too. You don't even need to extract anything from a database or do some complicated stuff. As an admin you have free access to all moderation tools no matter where the post is from, including the option to "view votes".

[–] Wispy2891@lemmy.world 33 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

The IP address thing is not real, though

Just choose a nickname that is random word+4 random digits and don't reuse it on other services

[–] disobey2623@lemmy.dbzer0.com 21 points 4 days ago

This is the way. Randomise your usernames and use a password manager to keep track of them.

[–] SugarCatDestroyer@lemmy.world 2 points 2 days ago

Freedom is a luxury and anonymity is a crime. After all, how can any slave think to hide his intentions from his masters?

[–] gazby@lemmy.zip 32 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Sir, this is the Fediverse.

[–] npdean@lemmy.today 15 points 4 days ago (9 children)

It is nowhere explicitly made clear to users that voting is public. It should be made clear if it is going to be

[–] gazby@lemmy.zip 13 points 4 days ago (3 children)

It's the other way around here: Everything is public except where it's made clear that it won't be (e.g. email address, password).

For what it's worth, your instance of choice is particularly negligent in regard to informing its users. Compare lemmy.today/legal to lemmy.world/legal, or their respective signup pages for examples. There's little that Lemmy itself or the community at large can do about that 😞

load more comments (3 replies)
load more comments (8 replies)
[–] daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com 65 points 4 days ago (17 children)

Don't tell anyone, but your posts and comments are also public.

load more comments (17 replies)
[–] teft@piefed.social 44 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (14 children)

I like piefed because it lets you see at a glance if someone is a serial downvoter. On each piefed user profile is a thing called “attitude” and it’s a ratio of your upvotes vs downvotes. ~~100% means the person doesn’t downvote people. 50% means they downvote and upvote equally. 0% is only downvotes.~~ Edit: I saw someone today with negative % so it must be 100% is all upvotes. 0% is half upvotes half downvotes. -100% is all downvotes.

It shows up for people outside piefed too so i see you too lemmy angry people.

load more comments (14 replies)
[–] jason@discuss.online 38 points 4 days ago (3 children)

Russia really should just leave Ukraine, though. (Sorry, I just saw the context for this a few minutes ago and can't help myself).

load more comments (3 replies)
[–] Smeagol666@crazypeople.online 22 points 4 days ago (5 children)

Are you sure about that? Reddit is a fucking cesspool.

load more comments (5 replies)
[–] gedaliyah@lemmy.world 55 points 5 days ago (8 children)

While it is important to know that voting is not private (nor truly is direct messaging), that is not in itself a danger.

Lemmy is community driven, and so it is — broadly speaking — governed by community norms and the platform is responsive to the needs of those norms. If someone is harassing or mistreating you on the basis of your voting, then you can take it up with an admin. I've seen people called out for the use of vote manipulation, but I'm not sure what it would look like to be targeted based on your votes.

By the way, there are also mechanisms for publicly addressing grievances with mods and admins.

Most importantly, recognize that it does take time to adjust to the reality that no one cares about the fake internet points here. Reddit uses dark patterns to manipulate users into equating votes with worthiness. Having a lot of karma on reddit contributes to a person's reputation and credibility there. Here, no one cares, or even sees, a person's vote totals. Like most everything else, it's technically public, but it's not visible or indicated.

Why does reddit want you to care about your karma? For engagement and metrics. If people are only incentivized to share genuine interests and human interaction, then they won't scroll mindlessly for quite as long. If every post and comment is incentivized for maximum virality, then Reddit can sell more eyeballs to advertisers. Plus, if people care enough about their fake points, they will literally pay to buy reputation. Reddit doesn't care about your well-being, just your ad impressions. Like any other social media corp.

Welcome to a better, healthier, more transparent place. We are far from perfect, but no one here will use dark patterns to mine you for content.

load more comments (8 replies)
[–] hypnicjerk@lemmy.world 23 points 4 days ago (4 children)

this is why i vote at random, like two-face doing his quarter thing

load more comments (4 replies)
load more comments
view more: next ›