You Should Know

33219 readers

40 users here now

YSK - for all the things that can make your life easier!

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)

Rule 1- All posts must begin with YSK.

All posts must begin with YSK. If you're a Mastodon user, then include YSK after @youshouldknow. This is a community to share tips and tricks that will help you improve your life.

Rule 2- Your post body text must include the reason "Why" YSK:

**In your post's text body, you must include the reason "Why" YSK: It’s helpful for readability, and informs readers about the importance of the content. **

Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.

Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.

Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Posts and comments which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.

Rule 6- Regarding non-YSK posts.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-YSK posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

Rule 7- You can't harass or disturb other members.

If you harass or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

If you are a member, sympathizer or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.

For further explanation, clarification and feedback about this rule, you may follow this link.

Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.

Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.

Rule 10- The majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.

Unless included in our Whitelist for Bots, your bot will not be allowed to participate in this community. To have your bot whitelisted, please contact the moderators for a short review.

Partnered Communities:

You can view our partnered communities list by following this link. To partner with our community and be included, you are free to message the moderators or comment on a pinned post.

Community Moderation

For inquiry on becoming a moderator of this community, you may comment on the pinned post of the time, or simply shoot a message to the current moderators.

Credits

Our icon(masterpiece) was made by @clen15!

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

3367

YSK: Your Lemmy activities (e.g. downvotes) are far from private (i.imgur.com)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

1196 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Edit: obligatory explanation (thanks mods for squaring me away)...

What you see via the UI isn't "all that exists". Unlike Reddit, where everything is a black box, there are a lot more eyeballs who can see "under the hood". Any instance admin, proper or rogue, gets a ton of information that users won't normally see. The attached example demonstrates that while users will only see upvote/downvote tallies, admins can see who actually performed those actions.

Edit: To clarify, not just YOUR instance admin gets this info. This is ANY instance admin across the Fediverse.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Especially because you might not know why someone was downvoting the post/comment.

Case in point: https://lemmy.ml/comment/1009973 A decent number of users thought it was a good idea to downvote this post because they didn't want to give Nazis more publicity. However, someone could take a look at all of the downvotes on this post and make the assumption that everyone who downvotes it is a Nazi themselves.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Exactly. In that case, you have a meme that's literally just about how Nazis are trying to get into the Fediverse. The fact that Nazis exist is a terrible thing, and both the beauty and the downside of the Fediverse is that they can make their own platform for that garbage. So a lot of people, and maybe rightfully so, might say we shouldn't give them publicity so they downvote the post thinking that they're in the right. Others might upvote the post because it's a funny meme (which it is). Regardless, you now have people who can be "targeted" for agreeing with Nazis because they chose to vote the way they do.

Downvotes being public can lead to one of two things happening.

If people start making a big deal out of it, people might be less likely to downvote others. This can lead to discussion that isn't moderated by the people because the people don't want to take flak if they aren't with the "hivemind".
On the other hand, it may also lead to an increase in good discussion because people aren't disliking everything just for disagreeing with it. Maybe you won't see comments about vaccines get downvoted because they don't want others to attack them for their views.

I think the former is much more likely than the latter, but then part of me believes that maybe it'll lead to better discussion because you might be called on to defend your views more often. If you hate abortion and downvote a comment, you might now need to defend that stance which can potentially open up the discussion.

Ultimately, it'll depend on the Lemmy community. If we're just Reddit 2.0 (or 3.0 or 4.0 depending on how you look at it), then I think public downvotes can lead to worse conversation as bots and assholes target people who disagree. Inversely, if we are a better community that is more interested in discussion, then it could lead to better discussions overall. Looking over at any of the politics/news communities leads me to think it's more of the latter, but the more niche communities seem to be much better.

I guess time will tell how it turns out.