I assume there’s no privacy whatsoever, and I wouldn’t believe anyone who told me otherwise.
In my opinion this isn’t that big of a problem since it’s fairly hard to look at and discern
You are like one LLM prompt away from a website that makes it fairly easy to look at and discern so that’s not really a valid argument
Completely public
I don't worry about that. I have no expectation that up/downvotes be not tied to my username.
Literally none I basically assumed that anything I do on the internet can be read by anyone at any time. I'm still a fucking freak because they'll have to kill me to stop me from being freaky. If I die unexpectedly the government did it. Never forget that.
He died how he lived: being freaky.
☑️ No
✅ Yes
Votes are not private and never will be.
There have been some discussions about whether Threadiverse software should only federate out the number of votes and perhaps some anonymised voter IDs, rather than information that identifies individual users. This would prevent vote snooping via sites like Lemvotes. However, even if something like that were implemented, instance admins would still be able to snoop on their own users if they so wished. So imo, it's better to just accept that votes are public information.
Personally I don't see the issue with it. My principle when it comes to voting is upvoting stuff I want others to see and only downvote things I don't think anyone would want to see (like spam). So if for some odd reason someone is interested enough to check my voting history, I don't care. What's the worst that could happen? Someone on the internet disagrees with my votes? Oh no! How will I ever survive?!
As a side note, Lemmy's developers seem to have a strong opinion that voter information shouldn't be displayed publicly. For example, here's an issue they opened in the Mbin repo. While I disagree with their stance on vote visibility, Nutomic has a valid point there: Lemmy doesn't mark voting activity as public when federating it out, so there's an argument to be made that other software should not display individual votes coming from Lemmy.
What’s the worst that could happen?
Some data brokers looking through your preferences and building a profile out of you, I guess.
Sure, but what they're gonna do with that is the question. Like even if there is a profile on my Lemmy account, which ads are they going to send me? How? Where is that data going to be worth anything?
I mean I live in a country whose political environment was irrevocably changed because of Cambridge Analytica. And facebook's algorithm is partly being blamed for the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar. It's not really about you that I'm worried with, but for others in general.
Lemmy's developers seem to have a strong opinion that voter information shouldn't be displayed publicly.
I guess they shouldn't have made votes public then... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Well, if we wanna still have voting actions federate between instances and different services (meaning everyone can see the total vote counts, not just the votes given by users on single instance), that information has to be publicly sent to other instances. Like I said, I believe there have been some discussions about ways to anonymize outgoing voting actions, but I imagine there would be quite a few issues to think about. For instance, doing so would probably make it much easier for bad actors to send bogus votes.
The difference of opinion is that Lemmy's devs believe that services receiving voting data from Lemmy shouldn't publicly display individual votes, but only the aggregate counts (just like Lemmy itself does). Many others, myself included, think this approach creates a false sense of privacy, potentially leading some users to believe that their votes are private when they actually aren't, especially given that services like Lemvotes exist.
I don't expect much privacy on a shared public space like the fediverse. If I wanted privacy, I'd spin up a new profile every day/week, and use an external bookmark manager to save stuff
This is the anonymous way
Well they aren’t private and it doesn’t matter
I have no expectations of privacy on any social media, including this one. I'm here to yell my very important opinions at anyone who'll listen.
Nothing I do on the Fediverse is private lmao.
From the technical side anyone can spin up their own Lemmy instance and view all votes,
Or just view them on lemvotes.org.
I wish my votes were even more public. If I've taken the time to downvote your bullshit/nonsense, I want you to know it was me. Same with upvotes.
They're not private at all, I've never been under the illusion that they were.
I like it, have some guts, stand on business. If people want to downvote they should be willing to attach their name to it, internet points are fake anyway.
My issue with votes is being able to profile users on a pretty deep level. It may not matter all that much now but once bad actors like corporations, scammers, stalkers, etc. start getting involved then there's a lot negatives that it would bring with it.
That's understandable; to me though, the user tracking is going to happen. If not votes then comments, if not comments the how long you stayed per page or some other engagement metric.
These days you almost have to assume an adversarial relationship with the internet. You have to assume you're being aggressively tracked and profiles built and, if it's part of your threat model, take steps to obfuscate that.
I totally support someone just lurking and not commenting or voting, especially if they're doing it for OPSEC reasons. I also don't have a huge issue with people having alt accounts for different purposes and might even encourage it, again for OPSEC reasons.
A solid argument could be made for removing voting completely and I'm not sure I'd disagree with it; but due to the nature of federation if there's voting, it'll be public.
not. at all. i consider anything i put here akin to standing on my nearest street corner during rush hour, shouting into the darkness
confused how anyone could think anything otherwise.
confused how anyone could think anything otherwise
Because you can't see them by default. Just because there are lots of techies on here doesn't mean everyone thinks about how it all works.
I think it's much better to make it very obvious that votes are public so new users don't accidentally think they're anonymous.
I guarantee you multiple individuals be they personal or corporate have spun up their own Lemmy instances and are scraping the shit out of what is here.
Exactly, so it's important for everyone to know that their every action is very public
If you want privacy you shouldn't be using a computer. Full stop.
I get your point but it's so reductive that it's kind of unhelpful. Sure if the CIA are coming after you then you are pretty fucked, but there are so many tiny things that the casual user can do to make massive improvements, and saying that none of it matters if they even use a computer means they won't bother even trying.
I never said don't care about it. But people need to realize that if they don't want someone to know something the first thing is don't fucking say it.
There is so much The Internet does not know about me because I don't post it ever. It's like people don't understand that.
Stand by your vote.
I don't expect my votes to be private, but I will vote as if they were. People reading too much into why someone might have voted a certain way and trying to shame them for it is embarrassing, I'm not going to constrain myself to reasons for voting that are immediately legible to anyone via only one bit of information just for their sake. If I want to downvote something with, for instance, a political message I agree with but the person phrased it in a way that goes against my pet peeves, I'm gonna do that, and I think the ideal would be for these numbers not to be taken very personally or seriously.
So basically I'd say it's bad taste to put it in a UI, but only so far as it encourages people to be weird about it, and ultimately that's on them.
I vote by using a whiteboard marker on my monitor, that way no one can steal my lucky charms.
Not at all, and I believe that’s the point.
zero, it's on the internet, it:s not "private"
Lemvotes shows votes. So, it’s not private.
Moderators can also see votes on posts in their communities. I assume instance admins can do the same for everything.
Yes, admins can see all votes. (source: am admin)
Data has to federate, so nothing is going to really be private like you mention. I think it's unreasonable to expect anything otherwise. I don't see a point to hiding votes because of this. If someone starts stalking or harassing their voters for some reason, have a reporting system and handle that.
On Lemmy? As others have said, they're automatically federated and so anyone can see them.
On Piefed though? I have a user setting where I can choose whether my votes federate and I can override that default on a given post if I choose with a hot key. That's how it should be. IMHO, more of y'all should use Piefed.
On the other hand, setting local votes means that your vote doesn’t count for the vast majority of the verse.
That's kind of neat, but why would it matter if your votes do or don't federate?
Like someone else said, how would you feel if someone was collecting all user votes across the threadiverse and tracking who likes and dislikes each post, say about politics or just a news story?
We are mostly / usually anonymous here but like everything online, I wouldn't totally count on that. Not to sound like too much of a crackpot, but "Enemy of the state" could be a real label some government could put on you, based on your voting, in the future.
If I was worried about that I'd probably refrain from voting on those kind of posts, or use a separate account to do it. As it is whoever is u/d a post or comment is easily viewable anyway.
Personally, I don’t care too much about my votes being public. I vote very thoughtfully and try to upvote posts and comments that add to the community and I downvote misinformation.
But, I think people should be able to choose. I do think there are many valid reason for them to be private.
Zero. Upvotes are a show of appreciation and I don't see why anyone would want that to be private. When it comes to downvotes, if you wouldn't want someone to know you downvoted something, you can't stand by that decision and so shouldn't have downvoted in the first place. Public reactions (alongside the self moderation features) keeps the fediverse honest and prevents the hostile type of downvote spamming you see on other platforms like reddit.
On a privacy scale of 1 to 100: 2.
Mods can see it, all someone has to do is spin up a private instance and they can see it too, plus there's Lemvotes. It's kinda neat like I can see that I upvoted 8,052 posts and downvoted 17 from that account, or from this account I upvoted 15,327 comments and downvoted 86.
Some instances though - like PieFed.social - have defederated from Lemvotes, so anyone's vote offered to a community on that instance will not be counted by Lemvotes. But ofc that's merely one of many tools for me to find the data, whereas if someone spins up their own instance then they - or a community mod - can still see it by other means.
The reason I went into all this detail is bc if is relevant to your purpose that not everyone on the Threadiverse shares the same view about vote privacy. Some instances will defederate from yours in an attempt to retain control over the visibility of votes from their own. So perhaps you can devise some mechanism to allow admins the choice to opt-out, without having to defederate from your entire instance wholesale?
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