On every thread or post, if you click on more
and activity
, you’ll get the info.
I personally find this to be a good things, I’ve seen people using downvote way too easily. I like the idea that we need to be somehow accountable for those mechanism.
edit: It could be somehow improved to have an option to let this info only available between concerned users.
edit edit: I think that up/downvote info shouldn’t be public, but kept private between the users involved. we need to address this privacy issue.
Hmm, yeah, I don’t like this at all. I can see some benefits but I really don’t want to have to worry about what I’m voting on. If I downvote some lunatic I don’t want them being able to harass me about it. And it feels way too social-media-y for me. This could be a dealbreaker for a lot of people if there isn’t at least a way to opt out.
I agree on all points especially about the social media feel. I don’t want instagram or facebook where it shows so and so liked/disliked/reacted to something.
I think this forces something that nobody paid attention to in Reddiquete, which was that if you don’t like something, you just shouldn’t vote on it. Downvotes were supposed to be for when something actively didn’t belong, not just something you didn’t agree with. Of course, another way to do that would be to just get rid of the Reduce button entirely.
I mainly used downvotes on trolls and other bad-faith comments, people just being purposefully annoying in the comments. Exactly the kind of people I don’t want to engage with, just downvote and move on.
The fediverse is always ahead on things like moderation, so I don’t forsee downvote harassers becoming a thing here. Eventually, you’ll be able to easily block/report/ban them.
I’m not even sure allowing an opt out would be technically feasible without some big work. Your votes have to be sent to other servers to keep counts consistent and you can’t control whether that server shows or hides votes. So any option you set on your own instance won’t have an effect outside your instance.
Apart from the issue of harassers, I don’t see a good reason for hiding votes. Showing votes might help prevent brigades or similar vote harassment (e.g. user always downvotes another user they don’t like).
I’m still figuring out how this works. Does Lemmy also make your votes public? It doesn’t seem to me like it does (though I may be wrong) and that’s part of the fediverse too, no?
I don’t see anywhere in the lemmy UI where you can see votes, but I’m sure there’s ways to get the votes through the API.
So maybe the solution is don’t worry about votes being technically public but hide them from the UI, but I don’t think even that solution is required.
Well, I’m sure Reddit tracked who voted on what behind the scenes too, sites have to or else you can just vote multiple times on multiple devices/apps/browsers. I’m not worried about that really, since it’s unavoidable. Making them public is my issue.
I think the point is for the votes to be federated, the instance has to know who has actually voted. The issue being that information is then on the instance the post is hosting, and due to how posts propagate, there’s nothing stopping another instance putting who voted on what front and center, and just pulling that data from the host instance.
Ah, I see the point there. That a new instance with a different UI could put them up.
I’m certainly no tech expert, but if it’s about the API, then how did third-party Reddit apps work with it? The votes definitely synced between different versions of Reddit, could a third-party Reddit app have been made that showed votes publicly? If not, what was the system behind that, and could it work here? Again, no idea, there may be a very good reason why what I’m thinking wouldn’t work, but I dunno what it would be.
I’m far from an expert on this sort of thing, but I would wager that the only voting data available through Reddit’s API is the current number of up and downvotes, the overall vote score, and whether the account requesting the information has up or down voted, for any given post / comment.
It can do that because the data is centralised, and every account exists in one place, whereas federation has to say “cavalarrr@kbin.social upvoted this comment, and so did username@beehaw.org”, because there’s nowhere to store that data centrally, other than the post itself.
@jake_eric I see the opposite. Making votes and especially downvotes private facilitates a kind of micro-harassement by individuals or organized groups.
@aroom
I see where you’re coming from, but on the flip side, I think it empowers the bad-faith trolls who have way too much time and energy to get into fights. On Reddit, if I see someone just being a general asshole, I’ll downvote and move on. If that person can see that I’ve done that, I’m not gonna feel as comfortable doing that, lest they retaliate somehow.
You could turn it around and say that it empowers non-asshole users to fight back as well, but the assholes tend to have more energy to get into fights, that’s part of the reason why they’re being assholes online in the first place.
I can tell you I’ve absolutely never wished Reddit votes were shared knowledge. Even if it would occasionally be useful information, it’s just not worth it for me.