this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2023
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They do, that's why I said having them public is what lets voting be a thing.
There are instances out there that already hide some aspects of voting, beehaw.org doesn't show downvotes in their interface for example. But I expect that someone who's keen on being a troll or stalker will gravitate towards instances that have that information at their fingertips. Hiding the information from the interface of a particular instance doesn't make the actual data go away and a different instance can show it just fine.
That's what I'm trying to get at though. I understand that voting data will ultimately be accessible to anyone who is dedicated enough (they can spin up their own instance). You yourself seem to see why some instances might want to obfuscate this information seeing as you brought up BeeHaw. You yourself state that trolls and stalkers would like all this information at their fingertips. These are valid arguments for making this data more bothersome to access.
What are the positive benefits that motivates an instance to go in the opposite direction and make everything easily accessible and public? Whats the completion of the sentence "I think it's good that everyone can see who up/downvotes them because ___"?
The only two arguments I've gotten so far is that it might help identify bots/vote manipulation and a more general "it's technically publicly accessible by anyone so might as well just show it to everyone".
It's not just technically publicly available, though. Anyone can go to an instance that displays it (which is basically all of them) and take a look right now.
This is a thoroughly unbottled genie, the only way you're going to get it back inside is if every instance was to agree to hide this information and defederate from any stragglers that don't. It's infeasable at this point. IMO hiding the information on a few individual instances is only going to give a false sense of security.
Then they know the information is out there, and they can use it themselves to spot people who are abusing the system.
And regardless of whether you think it's "good", the information is out there.
This is true for Kbin, but I don't believe I have come across a Lemmy instance that shows you who up/downvoted you. Hell, as far as I know most Lemmy instances hide "karma" too. You have to check these things from the Kbin side (unless you spin up your own Lemmy instance). Which is the reason this whole thread started.
While it will be impossible to prevent those actively seek out this information, most people will still flock to the largest instances. A percentage of those will be inclined to want to abuse voting info. If the big instances obfuscate it, maybe some amount of harassment can be avoided. Even the friction of having to switch accounts to check will be enough to prevent some heat-of-the-moment reactions.
I guess that's the trade-off. Having everything easily and openly accessible makes things easy for trolls, stalkers and harassers; obfuscating it might mislead users into thinking they're anonymous.
Thank you for the answer. I'm still not convinced it's not worth trying to hide it, but that's a very fair and valid stance.
That's true. And regardless of how an instance decides to run it's voting policy, it's an important fact to make the users aware of.
Wasn't aware Lemmy was missing this information in their UI. I suppose that should satisfy those who want to avoid it, for now anyway.