cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/361524
If you are browsing through https://kbin.social/ or whatever just click on “more” then activity.
There you’ll see info like boosts, reduces (downvotes), and favorites (upvotes?)
Works with all instances for lemmy or kbin material
Honestly, I am not down for this at all. It’s one thing to be able to get that info by hosting your own instance and another thing to be publicly called out like that. From a privacy perspective, I just don’t need the average joe seeing what I’ve been upvoting and downvoting.
I’m with you on that. It definitely has me reevaluating how I interact with Lemmy.
This is something of a ticking time bomb, I think. I don’t think the majority of people coming to Lemmy right now appreciate that their votes are public, and sooner or later somebody is going to write a bot or addon that uses that data to harass or censor users and it’s going to be a scandal that scares people away.
Making votes public is a really bad idea because it disincentivizes users to vote how they like, for fear of reprisal. This is quintessential to a democratic system, and to a social media platform.
You want this place to grow, and order for it to grow, users have to interact. They are the engine behind the content aggregation, they should never feel hesitation to vote.
I couldn’t have said it better myself. Voting secrecy is very important. There’s a reason why your government ballot isn’t posted on some public bulletin board in the town square for everyone to see. I see no reason why it should be any different for online community voting.
For me personally, I am somewhat okay with Lemmy’s implementation because it isn’t so public for the average user and is understandable given the requirements of federation (at least until we figure out a way to anonymize vote counts in aggregate), but kbin’s implementation just crosses the line IMHO.
I’m not a fan of votes being so public either. It almost seems to guarantee potential harassment as the platform grows. Hiding the “more” button on kbin only kicks the can down the road if this is a natural part of federating instances. The problem just comes back once a single instance makes the information available.
Without a change to the protocol, I think we’re stuck with education. Maximize the awareness from users that votes behave differently here, and are entirely public.
People have moved from reddit expecting a 1:1 copy of the features, and for the most part it delivers. The comment system has all of the friendliness of upvoting, but if you click the arrows you’re stuck committing to more of a retweet. This could really bite users who reuse their account name everywhere, and those that use their real name online.
People getting started should learn about this as soon as possible and really consider how it will affect them. Do they really want to engage with the NSFW content, or maybe a new username is in order?
It would be horrible if users were to arrive with the wrong impression, have a negative experience and regret showing up at all.
