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

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.

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.

It's the nature of the beast. Federated software holds no secrets.
Related: https://sopuli.xyz/post/31369487

I don’t think IP addresses federate? I think only your instance admin can see your IP address. In any case, though, you should generally always assume that your up/down votes on any service are recorded and tied to your username. If you can come back later and change your vote, that vote is tied to your username. It may not be visible to other users, but the server admins can absolutely see what you’re doing.

Reddit might not make your votes publicly visible, but they’re absolutely tracking them and using that information to select what you see, including advertising. They might not directly share those votes with advertisers, but they almost certainly are sharing your interests based on your votes. And you should assume Reddit and others will comply if the government comes asking for what users liked a post the government opposes, or who downvoted a post praising a new government initiative.

It depends on your threat model, but your threat model might change. Freedom of speech might be curtailed by politicians even when that’s supposed to be unconstitutional. What might be safe to do online now might become unsafe in a year or two.

YSK: every action you take online, even as simple as an Upvote or Like, might be recorded and may come back to haunt you

My votes are a massive privacy risk? How? I'm putting them out there publicly willingly. As is the nature of the internet.

I dsiagree that transparent upvotes are an issue. In fact i think it's a powerful feature for community to self correct and resist astro turfing.

On reddit votes have become meaningless because they are not 1 person == 1 vote and its completely astroturfed. You can literally got to buyredditvotes dot com (not real but real ones are very close just google it) and stuff any post with votes and nobody will ever know.

Transparent interactions are key for community health even if behind anonymous nicknames. So all interactions should be transparent.

My only issue is that many lemmy instances are blocking popular VPN services which is very dangerous. I understand the bot argument but (even though residential proxies are dirt cheap these days) user safety suffers hard here.

Oh no now the lemmy.ml special mods will know I downvote them when I see them lol

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

It's currently impossible to have private upvotes and downvotes with a federated service. It could probably be done, but it'd need a big revamp of the ActivityPub protocol, and apps would need to adopt the new protocol version. It's not trivial.

Just hiding the data in the UI doesn't solve it, because the data is still there.

Additionally, a lot of other social media sites have public votes/likes, as long as the content is public. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Discord, LinkedIn, Telegram (if you consider it social media?), and probably some others all have public likes by default.

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

How do you do this and where can I find this info because I'd like to know.

I'll start by asking you if I upvoted or downvoted this post.

Cool stuff right? Everyone can spy on you, and you can keep them guessing by behaving incongruent. Lots of fun!

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.

Seems like a good thing to me. Should be a better known feature.

How would I go about seeing this information for myself?

It's a good thing to be concerned about privacy! While voting patterns/voting retaliation is certainly possible on Lemmy, I think following good general security practices can go a long way towards mitigating those things. (Anyone who's new to online privacy or needs a helping hand to get started should def check out the EFF's Surveillance Self-Defense site.)

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

No.

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.

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.

Why?

Sir, this is the Fediverse.