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"Your downvote was reported."
(lemmy.world)
I know, public votes, that's how Lemmy and the Fediverse work.
It bothers me a little though.
edit: this post is gaining traction, I censored the user's name as it's unimportant and better to avoid possible harassment
It bothers you that someone would report it? Or that someone took the time/effort to actually directly message you claiming that they did so?
Public votes could be an issue is my point. They probably didn't report it, no rules were broken. It's just to be annoying.
On reddit I didn't wonder if people would scrutinize my votes if I wanted to go against the flow for whatever reason (comments are a different dynamic)
Example: feel free to downvote this, I promise I won't contact you with a fake report claim
It's specifically a (shitty) intimidation move. "Don't downvote me again or a mod/admin will happen." Pretty pathetic as far as intimidation moves go but that's keyboard warriors for you.
i personally don’t like the public votes in the same way i don’t like public comments or profiles. Pre-lemmy i just didn’t make accounts and didn’t interact with stuff, but here i’ve tried to consciously push myself to interact because imo lemmy (and libre social media in general) is worth the slight sacrifice of privacy.
r*ddit was the de-facto knowledge base of the internet, and letting corporations control the knowledge humanity creates publicly is a huge fuck-up we can only fight with strong legislative action (never gonna happen) or by collectively moving to libre alternatives. ik im preaching to the choir here, but my point in saying this is that we’re doing small but not negligible amounts of good by interacting here even at a loss of personal privacy - only you can decide if that’s worthwhile under your personal threat model.
also worth considering that on the other place people could absolutely scrutinize your votes, since administrators could almost definitely see them the same way they can here. the difference is just that here the admins are whoever chooses to run a server, rather than whoever r*ddit chooses to allow access to. definitely opens it up to more people, but imo feels more honest this way where it’s not faking a level of privacy it doesn’t have.
another note cuz im already rambling, iirc piefed has an interesting idea for this where only “trusted” servers federate the actual votes, and untrusted ones get fake alt accounts that total to the same numbers. i’m not sure i personally care about this, since to me this whole social media shit is already public domain, but if that appeals to you it might be worth checking out
Of course I'm not claiming reddit respects privacy as a whole, I'm specifically talking between basic users.
Thanks for the Piefed info, I'll look into it. made an account a while back, it's quite good.
As I said tgo someone else above, I think this is a cop-out.
If Fedi's features suck expressing support by giving them a pass on implementation or privacy issues isn't helpful either to improve the issues or in the process of making open alternatives more popular.
For the record, nothing is being gained here in terms of features. Up/downvoting already doesn't do what it's supposed to do and it already isn't reliable or consistent across instances/services pretty much at all. Being public is the cherry on top of the "wanted to look like we have the feature but we really, really don't" sundae.
I just shake my head every time someone attempts to assert votes mean anything within an environment where a solid 90% of the content is inorganic.
Unfortunately public votes aren't a choice, it's a requirement for how the system works. Reddit also knew who voted for what, but it was safely hidden on their servers.
Every post and every vote is replicated across all the Lemmy servers (well, simplification, but mostly true).
Server owners don't have to share it, but the information is in the database so it's always going to be possible for someone to make a tool that displays it.
There's not really an alternative - the Lemmy server needs to know what each person has voted on so it displays to them, so they can only vote once, etc. Not to mention that if it was anonymous, you could probably engineer a malicious system on other Lemmy servers to do massive vote manipulation even easier.
I'm not seeing a way to both make things distributed and anonymous.
Counterpoint: public votes make it possible to spot users who try to manipulate the platform by voting with multiple accounts.
That just happened recently with a new user account that has been posting a ton. No one noticed they were doing this until they started harassing users and their harassment comments were showing a pattern of upvotes. Who would upvote a user harassing others like that? Well, themselves.