Lemmy devs are considering making all votes public - have your say

https://piefed.social/post/203735

Lemmy devs are considering making all votes public - have your say

Probably better to post in the github issue rather than replying here. https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/4967

Hard no from me

I don’t want some nutjob with too much time stalking me because I upvoted something about climate change or downvoted some bigoted shit. We all know those fuckos are out there

Voting on Reddit-like platforms is soft moderation by a community, and if you disincentive that, the whole model kinda falls apart IMO

Your votes are already public. It’s a matter of (a) do we want to make it slightly easier for the people who aren’t technically inclined to see them too (b) do we want people acting with the awareness that they’re public.

(a) doesn’t have a clear answer to me. The answer to (b), though, is clearly yes.

Your votes are already public.

People say this all the time, but it's not really the case.

I don't think privacy is a binary thing that one either has or does not - there are degrees of privacy. Currently what we have is mostly private, requiring either technical skill or admin access to circumvent. This is a pretty high bar which 99% of people would not be able to reach. You're proposing removing the bar entirely because it is not high enough.

requiring either technical skill or admin access to circumvent.

What if some troll sets up a website that indexes/publishes this data? What technical skill would be required then?

The data is public and ignorance is not bliss. People need to be made aware of this. If this will lead to people being more careful about what they post online or how they interact with a public social media service, then all the better.

They'd get defederated from.
  • You don’t need to be federated to read people’s activities…
  • Even if there was some type of “authorized fetch” involved, one could bypass it easily by writing a bot on LW to get the data. Then what?
  • Ok, yeah, theoretically.

    But we're talking about putting voting info into the UI for anyone to see. Not highly motivated and skilled bad actors.

    It’s in the mbin ui already
    So the technical-skill-bar is transforming a lemmy link into the equivalent on an mbin instance? That is huge.