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submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by muddybulldog@mylemmy.win to c/youshouldknow@lemmy.world

Edit: obligatory explanation (thanks mods for squaring me away)...

What you see via the UI isn't "all that exists". Unlike Reddit, where everything is a black box, there are a lot more eyeballs who can see "under the hood". Any instance admin, proper or rogue, gets a ton of information that users won't normally see. The attached example demonstrates that while users will only see upvote/downvote tallies, admins can see who actually performed those actions.

Edit: To clarify, not just YOUR instance admin gets this info. This is ANY instance admin across the Fediverse.

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[-] muddybulldog@mylemmy.win 7 points 1 year ago

I'll contribute that my intent with this post is not evangelism. I like the voting system and would be disappointed to see it disappear.

A vote in Reddit was, from a practical perspective, anonymous. While it was recorded in the database and admins had access to this information there were mitigations in place to deter abuse and the end result was that the person you up or down voted was not going to know that YOU, personally, downvoted them. It was also of limited value to external data sifters in creating social graphs.

Since Lemmy votes are non-anonymously propagated across the Fediverse and, literally, anyone can be an admin there are people who may want to reconsider whether they upvote or downvote a particular post or comment. The actual reasons may vary; they don't want to be outed as sympathetic to a political view or cause, they don't want it used a social graph for targeted advertising or even spear-phishing. In many cases there will be people who don't care at all.

Just trying to contribute to transparency. Not everyone can read code, sift data or visualize how a social network would work behind the scenes. There's plenty of opportunities for others to use our data, good and evil. I believe that efforts to bring to light non-obvious consequences of actions is good citizenship.

this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2023
3365 points (96.1% liked)

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