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Lemmy votes ARE public, should they be anonymous? (discuss.tchncs.de)

submitted 4 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Currently, almost anyone in the Fediverse can see Lemmys votes. Lemmy admins can see votes, as well as mods. Only regular Lemmy users can't. Should the Lemmy devs create a way to make the votes anonymous?

There is a discussion going on right now considering "making the Lemmy votes public" but I think that premisse is just wrong. The votes are public already, they're just hidden from Lemmy users. Anyone from a kbin/mbin/fedia instance can check out the votes if they are so inclined.

The users right now may fall into a false sense of privacy when voting because the votes are hidden from Lemmy users. If you want to vote something and not show up on the vote list, please create another account to support that type of content and don't tell anyone.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

We could also have "karma" on Lemmy, but while technically tracked the environment is better off without it being public in my opinion. I view voting records similarly.

It's strange that they removed total account karma visibility a while back but are now thinking about making votes public.

I think a good compromise (since Lemmy already tracks that data) would have been to show the upvote/downvote ratio a user receives on their profile page, without showing their total karma. That'd help you spot toxic users without incentivising karma whoring.

Similarly, a display of how often a user upvotes versus downvotes others would help spot bots and trolls without completely obliterating privacy like their suggestion would.

(But ultimately none of this solves the problem of privacy on the Fediverse being one federated bad actor away from nonexistence)