You can see who upvoted and downvoted a post by viewing it in friendica.
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Upvotes seem to just federate as likes and dislikes.
I get this is obviously intended behaviour on part of actpub but I'd love for there to be a pseudo-anonymous voting system too. Maybe an option to hash user credentials when added to likes to ensure that they're unique whilst obfuscating the original user.
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Well yes, the visibility thing would be the point. Interesting and relevant content is upvoted, becoming more visible to more people, and uninteresting and irrelevant content is downvoted, becoming less visible and shown to fewer people.
Your interests are not identical with interests of other people.
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What can they use that data for?
It would only be usable data if they could show personalized ads to the users. They can’t.
All they know is that Meldrik up/downvoted this and that, but outside of Lemmy they have no idea who Meldrik is.
I think the issue is that many Lemmy users will think more carefully about what they comment than what they up/downvote, as a comment appears connected to your username but a vote doesn't. You might decide against commenting on something you disagree with because you don't want to get in a fight, instead just downvoting it, but if people then know if was you who downvoted can still pick the fight.
Basically the issue is you're revealing a lot more information than you might initially have realised if you'd have known votes were public all along. Maybe a disgruntled person uses that to dox you, or maybe a corpo feeds all that information into their fancy computer system to work out who you might be, who knows.
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I know, but some people assume votes are private.
If you'd only ever interacted with Lemmy and not read up on how ActivityPub works then that's a reasonable assumption, it's not like anything (that I've noticed!) actually tells you that your votes are public, and they don't look to be public in the places you're likely to see!
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I think lemmy instance admins can see this too. Doesn’t even have to be a friendica instance
Any instance admin can see the vote history.
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If you'd only ever interacted with Lemmy and not read up on how ActivityPub works then that's a reasonable assumption, it's not like anything (that I've noticed!) actually tells you that your votes are public, and they don't look to be public in the places you're likely to see!
Lemmy likes aren't meant to be public, this is just other software failing to respect the privacy Lemmy indicates.
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You are NOT supposed to downvote things that "aren't really interesting", you are actively ruining other people's user experience on here by doing that as downvoted posts get less visibility.
Some people might think it's not interesting because it's not appropriate content for that community, and that by downvoting they are improving the quality for everyone. I don't think every instance/community has a unified consensus on how exactly to use voting, and some people are always going to do their own thing regardless.
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Lemmy likes aren't meant to be public, this is just other software failing to respect the privacy Lemmy indicates.
Oh. If the only thing stopping the votes being public is a label saying pretty please don't make this public then it does seem very open to abuse.
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Oh. If the only thing stopping the votes being public is a label saying pretty please don't make this public then it does seem very open to abuse.
Especially in federated networks where the data isn't under access control, doubly so if the privacy extension is optional
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Hashing exists for this use case
Hashing alone if it's just usernames isn't enough. Need something like keyed hashes, but then malicious servers can lie about numbers of votes.
Otherwise you need something ridiculously overengineered like public but encrypted logs of user actions and Zero-knowledge proofs of correctness mapping everything to a distinct existing user without revealing who it is.
As I mentioned in another post: for consistency is better to have each server count total votes from their own users, send a signed & timestamped message with the count to the host of the post being voted on. Then the host can display a consistent vote count to everybody that shows where votes are coming from without manipulation of external votes.
Each individual server can lie about its count, but not by too much or else it will be detected and the server can get defederated (or have its votes ignored).
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Some people might think it's not interesting because it's not appropriate content for that community, and that by downvoting they are improving the quality for everyone. I don't think every instance/community has a unified consensus on how exactly to use voting, and some people are always going to do their own thing regardless.
Some people only browse global feeds and downvote stuff as if they're trying to train the Netflix recommendation algorithm, completely ignoring the rules of the community it originates from
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Some people only browse global feeds and downvote stuff as if they're trying to train the Netflix recommendation algorithm, completely ignoring the rules of the community it originates from
I remember that being a problem back on Reddit (though I always found people upvoting low-effort stuff that wasn't community/sub-appropriate to be more of a problem). It's kind of a site-wide UX issue though really, if a new casual user is just presented with a list of posts then they might genuinely be unaware of (or perhaps just uninterested in) where they came from and what their votes mean.
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I get this is obviously intended behaviour on part of actpub but I'd love for there to be a pseudo-anonymous voting system too. Maybe an option to hash user credentials when added to likes to ensure that they're unique whilst obfuscating the original user.
I mean, seems pretty pseudoanonymous to me, unless Musk had another kid he named apj2k36 or something.
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Hashing alone if it's just usernames isn't enough. Need something like keyed hashes, but then malicious servers can lie about numbers of votes.
Otherwise you need something ridiculously overengineered like public but encrypted logs of user actions and Zero-knowledge proofs of correctness mapping everything to a distinct existing user without revealing who it is.
As I mentioned in another post: for consistency is better to have each server count total votes from their own users, send a signed & timestamped message with the count to the host of the post being voted on. Then the host can display a consistent vote count to everybody that shows where votes are coming from without manipulation of external votes.
Each individual server can lie about its count, but not by too much or else it will be detected and the server can get defederated (or have its votes ignored).
but then malicious servers can lie about numbers of votes.
They already can do that by pretending to have users they don't have. It's definitely a quick way to get defederated.
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Upvotes seem to just federate as likes and dislikes.
Petty mods or users would abuse this
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I get this is obviously intended behaviour on part of actpub but I'd love for there to be a pseudo-anonymous voting system too. Maybe an option to hash user credentials when added to likes to ensure that they're unique whilst obfuscating the original user.
Hash them with the post ID appended, so a user can't be identified across posts
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Not them but yes but it's not a feature of the system, it's a failure of the humans.
i think we should be accounting for it if we don't wanna get swallowed by shitty interests tbh
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Petty mods or users would abuse this
It's already possible to see if you really want to look. Friendica is just another way.
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i think we should be accounting for it if we don't wanna get swallowed by shitty interests tbh
Like, of course; tho any sort of "accounting" should IMO start from the base that the intent of this entire thing is to publicly share public information.
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Some people might think it's not interesting because it's not appropriate content for that community, and that by downvoting they are improving the quality for everyone. I don't think every instance/community has a unified consensus on how exactly to use voting, and some people are always going to do their own thing regardless.
This is one of the reasons why I'd love to see a more expanded method of reacting to content rather than simply upvoting or dowvoting; something like, say, user-side thread or post tagging, with things like "verified", "clickbait", and mood reacts like "happy" vs "sad", and usefulness reacts like "solved, thanks" vs "closed as duplicate", etc. We need more and better axes.
(Axises? Axeses?
Asses?)
