this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2023
3367 points (96.1% liked)
You Should Know
33233 readers
2 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.
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 1 year ago
MODERATORS
People raise a good point that in countries where political dissent can actually be dangerous, this would very much dissuade people from voting on things they believe in, or even coming anywhere near Lemmy period.
A better approach I think would be to have the user's host instance save their votes (the database obviously needs to remember what you voted on), but when federating those votes with other instances just hand over a cumulative total, e.g., "here on vlemmy.net we have +18 votes for this comment", which the other instances can then add. There's no need to send user information with that data.
Pretty easy to make an instance that would auto vote certain things with suspicious amounts of votes
As it stands now, they have to fake the origin of some of those votes. Not much of a barrier, the fediverse generally accepts any user an instance says exists, but still, it's a barrier
And of course any instance thats blatantly manipulating votes is going to be defederated, but I'm more concerned with an instance that behaves normally until it encounters a keyword or user is been set to, and then gives their posts a -5 or whatever
This was my thoughts as well. I understand the need for an audit trail.
Would be very easy to build up an interaction graph with this data that could be used for fingerprinting. If this is an issue for you, though, just browse without signing in/interacting
Was just thinking about this more though, and unfortunately there can also be rogue instances that allow bot users to be created and interact with other instances posts, so this issue could still persist.
Could replace the usernames with UUIDs, and keep the username-UUID map back on the source instance? Then you get an audit trail, but not associated with user identity. There's also no guarantee that people don't use bob_jones as their username, and this is Personally Identifiable Information, which brings up some GDPR stuff too.
The problem with that is that every interaction that any user has with a post or a comment would require calls back to the home instance in order to lookup those usernames. That's a LOT of extra load
There is no reason you couldn't only do it for votes and not for posts and comments.
Yeah I just meant for the votes. If you make a comment with your username it's pretty clear you consented for the input and the username to be visible side by side.
The problem that Reddit realized early on is that user voting is the engine behind the content aggregation. That aggregation is one of the main selling points of Reddit. The more users vote on what they see, the more information Reddit has for how to aggregate that content. That's what keeps the front page fresh, that's what keeps content moving up and down on the site. In a very real sense, the voting is the heart pumping blood through the site.
So it behooves the site to not give any reason for users not to vote how they feel. Keeping votes private was part of that. It is one of the most basic tenets of democracy: the only way to give people the freedom to vote honestly and frequently is to give them the privacy to do it.
The potential for retaliation against users, in any number of conceivable ways, far outweighs any benefits that come from making votes public.
The voting information also makes it insanely easy to automate mass blocking of any opinion under the sun. Nobody in this thread seems to grasp all the things you can do with that data to manipulate user interactions on this site. If you think troll armies are bad, wait till those troll armies have a shared automated block list of every single person that has ever downvoted them.
Agreed, especially because I believe we’re headed for a repressive regime here in the US in about 2 years.
Places like this will need to get very careful if they want to remain bastions of free speech and places where people can come to find the information that will no longer be available in mainstream channels.
Lemmy is not a bastion of free speech lmfao
I think those users who live under oppressive governments should be used to using tools like Tor and accounts with a proton email to interact on the internet.
This. And make accounts with name generators so they're not traceable to you through patterns. And train yourself to not say things that are identifiable across accounts. 🚉
Fair point. Though if nothing else stripping out usernames from vote counts would maybe save some bandwidth or database queries for the instance.
How do we get this to happen?
That would allow to fake votes, as I can tweak my instance to spew any number I want.
Can probably fake votes anyway by faking usernames right? Harder, but still doable 🤔