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But it’s trivial to use an external tool to see who voted on what regardless of whose account it is.
It’s also trivial for us to defederate from such tools, which our instance and others have done in the case of lemvotes.
Honestly I think you are right. If it were obvious votes were public people would act differently, and while that's not desirable from a content perspective, it is from a user perspective.
People don't know unless it is in their face. Put it where everyone can see it. More drama, more engagement? Whatever.
I think PieFed has anonymous voting as an option. This might affect making vote histories more visible.
If I understand it right, each real piefed account gets an associated "shadow account" used for voting and the piefed instance admin that the account is from can correlate the two if needed.
It's a checkbox in settings.
[ ] Vote privately
Votes will be sent to untrusted instances using an alt
If the instance admin can still correlate the two, then whats the purpose of this feature?
Wouldn’t they be able to do the exact same upvote/downvote calcs as any other instance admin?
Generally speaking, anyone can correlate the two.
I mean, when a piefed user and a piefed shadow account participate and vote in the same thread, it doesn't take a rocket surgeon to conclude they might be the same person. Look through a handful of the user's comment threads, look for piefed users voting in the preceding comments for confirmation.
Unless the user only votes in threads they do not participate in, and only participates in threads they do not vote in, correlating the two accounts is trivial.
The difference is that voting is not publicly available, so people can't be judged for their voting behaviours, however, down voting bots etc can still be identified and banned by their home instance admin.
That being said, I don't like the feature, and would disable it if I could
I voted your comment up btw
I'm on that honour system now
You, sir, deserve and upvotr
Honestly I think you are right. If it were obvious votes were public people would act differently
Why? Lemmy is a pseudonymous platform. Who cares what content individual users up or downvote. The votes being public is the only way to deal with brigading across instances.
The comments below started me on a trail that led me to a relevant comment from a Lemmy dev:
I want to remind everyone that since users overwhelmingly don't want their votes snooped on (for good reason), we will never add anything like this inside lemmy, lemmy-ui, or jerboa.
Wouldn’t it make more sense to either implement real vote privacy or just open the viewing window up for everyone equally?
Vote privacy can be tricky in an environment where every vote gets sent to thousands of instances and needs to be verified as legit via the ActivityPub protocol.
Piefed does a good job of this I think. If vote privacy is enabled, they create a second account that is used only for votes. Other instances see the votes and can validate them against the vote account but it's not tied to the actual user (except in their home server database).
A benefit of this is that the vote account for the user is always the same, so you can still track vote manipulation, and ban the vote account if needed.
Even more anti lemmy propaganda. Capitalists must be scared shitless.
In what way is a suggestion for improving Lemmy anti Lemmy propaganda?
Your wording.
"I have an idea to improve it" or even opening an issue with the devs would be the way to do this. Instead you front against something that is, lets face it, tons more private and more free than 99% of the world population give less than half a shit about.
currently, every day people try to cancel either lemmy or the devs while fascists are killing protesters in the US and the whole world tries to get totalitarian capitalist control.
Its like living in a boring horror movie.
I liked the visibility of votes on kbin, convenient to see if one was getting up or down votes from a variety of users and not just the same people over and over.
But it’s trivial to use an external tool to see who voted on what regardless of whose account it is
Is there a tool made for this out there? As far as I'm aware, the simplest way for the average user to do that is to run their own instance and then manually query its database directly, which is far from trivial.
This came out a day or two ago, which removes that hurdle: https://lemvotes.org/
Just paste the permalink in. Works on posts, comments, and users.
It was only a matter of time.
That’s been out a couple months now.
There are several big name accounts on the fediverse that are very likely committing vote manipulation. If you mention it in the thread you will be brigaded. I see it everyday from the same accounts. Those same threads will have highly upvoted AI slop that most times doesn’t even relate to the thread. Not even a Markov chain, just completely unrelated. The same people that upvoted the original post all upvote the same AI slop. Comments that are related to the topic have much lower engagement.
I was going to spin up my own instance to track these people and later put out a report but I am currently way too busy to do that. Maybe in a couple weeks I can get started. If anyone else is as annoyed as me about this feel free to get started tracking these people and share the data with everyone please.
who do you think those are?
It’s not proper to drop names until we have evidence. I could be wrong about a few. However, It unlikely that we are wrong about them all.
I think most people already suspect some of the same accounts and can offer up names but I don’t think they should either. It’s probably best to gather evidence against them without them knowing we are looking at them.
What's your test to determine between "AI Slop" users and active accounts? Further, I think just releasing a report with voting habits and whatnot for certain accounts without having definitive proof is just witch-hunting. If you suspect accounts, I think it's best to just report them, unless your test to determine "AI Slop" is truly infallible.
Eh, that seems like a shit ton of clutter for no real benefit.
As it is, if someone wants the info, it's easy to get, but doesn't add more junk to the UI
this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2025
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