this post was submitted on 04 Mar 2024
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[–] [email protected] 62 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (3 children)

You also know that all votes are technically public and can be viewed by any instance admin that's federated with the server a community is on, right? There's no way to see that in the Lemmy UI at the moment but the data is there on the server.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 8 months ago (1 children)

The votes are directly visible from Kbin for users as well.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago

Only upvoting Lemmy users are visible on Kbin, downvoting Lemmy users are not listed.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (3 children)

There's no way to see that in the Lemmy UI at the moment but the data is there on the server.

Actually, they're adding it into the UI for admins. And they're letting mods see to.

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/2320

Rather than do anything to try and protect this data or obfuscate it in any way, they just decided "fuck it".

And that's frankly worrying. I truly don't think people understand why Reddit didn't let mods see that information. The avenues for abuse here are innumerable.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 8 months ago

Obfuscation is meaningless. It's public info or it's not. In this case it's necessarily public

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago (1 children)

It's not really possible to have an upvote counter without storing who voted, so your instance admin would always know

[–] [email protected] 10 points 8 months ago (1 children)

There are cryptographic methods to do this, but it’s probably not worth it to implement them for this.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Honestly, not implementing anonymous voting probably helps with preventing brigading, too. Reddit worldnews (around the api debacle began) became a nightmare of downvote bots towards anything that wasn't "Israel = good" in any way, and so many spam articles upvoted to the surface from random, unverified sources.

Edit to add: threat of defederation towards communities allowing or encouraging this behavior would probably be better, though.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

If there is abuse from a mod or an admin, you go somewhere else - either join another similar community or server or make your own.

Or in the case of abuse from mods, report them to admins (assuming admins are reasonable).

Remember, this isn't reddit. You don't have to live with the mods or admins, you can just stop going to that instance/community and find somewhere else.

Also ultimately being able to view votes is a way to combat abuse, as you can spot people who just down vote someone else constantly.

EDIT: Honestly confused about the down votes, someone would care to elaborate? :)

[–] [email protected] 18 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

Anyone with a federated instance can view your votes. Anyone on Kbin can view your votes. There's nothing "abusive" about viewing votes. It's not private information.

Edit: Example... I'm an admin on my own instance...

And yet here I can see the votes even though I'm not on your instance at all.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

I fully agree with you. My comment was just to say what you should do if you see abuse from mods and admins.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

What type of metadata is on a server attached to posts, comments, votes and such?