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Lemmy devs are looking to make votes public. Thoughts? (github.com)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/askchapo@hexbear.net
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I really wanted to post this on !traaaaaaannnnnnnnnns@hexbear.net but I'm not trans myself and I didn't want to take up their space.

Basically, the devs of Lemmy are looking to make upvotes public to everyone. Right now, I believe voter identities are known to server admins and mods.

I don't have a strong opinion on this myself, either for or against, as I write this comment, but I'm wondering if there's something I'm missing, frankly as a cishet dude.

But also... I've kinda lost trust in Nutomic making decisions about the software that won't make things worse for trans people since his comments on the Olympics were made public. Dessalines has (so far) at least tolerated Nutomic's transphobia despite whatever prior rhetoric. Frankly, I am suspicious that trans people don't matter to the Lemmy dev team...to be charitable...so I'd really like to hear your thoughts.

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[–] 47 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (10 children)

My position on removing our dislikes here on Hexbear was because of research papers showing it objectively caused negative outcomes.

I can't find the paper for this but I am 100% certain that this topic has been researched and that I recall public "likes" were healthier for user behaviour while public dislikes caused major problems.

I would be for public upvotes, I would recommend removing downvotes entirely as per the research, but in lieu of that and because Lemmy's mission is generally to be a reddit-clone I'd say keep the dislikes secret. Their existence is a negative to begin with, making them public is only going to spawn a huge number of confrontations as people confront the first person that downvoted them and demand a reason. It'll be a mess.

My position remains with the research on these topics, the research is good, a huge number of people here poo-poo'd the idea of removing downvotes but came around, trust the research.

Pinging this thread @dessalines@lemmy.ml way as you couldn't pay me to make a github account just to say this.

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  • [–] 31 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Found the paper! Don't fault you for not being able to find it, since the most obvious search keywords are generic and result in a bazillion unrelated studies--I just found it through your old comment:

    How Community Feedback Shapes User Behavior (PDF link is in the right-hand menu)

    Abstract:

    Social media systems rely on user feedback and rating mechanisms for personalization, ranking, and content filtering. However, when users evaluate content contributed by fellow users (e.g., by liking a post or voting on a comment), these evaluations create complex social feedback effects. This paper investigates how ratings on a piece of content affect its author’s future behavior. By studying four large comment-based news communities, we find that negative feedback leads to significant behavioral changes that are detrimental to the community. Not only do authors of negatively-evaluated content contribute more, but also their future posts are of lower quality, and are perceived by the community as such. Moreover, these authors are more likely to subsequently evaluate their fellow users negatively, percolating these effects through the community. In contrast, positive feedback does not carry similar effects, and neither encourages rewarded authors to write more, nor improves the quality of their posts. Interestingly, the authors that receive no feedback are most likely to leave a community. Furthermore, a structural analysis of the voter network reveals that evaluations polarize the community the most when positive and negative votes are equally split.

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  • [–] 9 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Every time I see you pop up you're writing incredibly sane things. You're so much more polite and put so much effort into your comments compared to me (on all my accounts). I'm glad you're contributing to the fediverse.

    Also I agree and have seen similar things. Much as the orange hellsite is loathsome they do have better discussions than reddit (although they're also largely populated by reactionaries, so you need to compare like with like). Removing downvotes was good, and I'm glad hexbear does.

    I don't think UIs should set expectations of privacy for users when something is public. And I don't support information being available only to the motivated or technically capable as the first category is full of lunatics and the second is just technocratic elitism.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago* (1 child)

    I can be a really aggressive asshole at times too! I am never that person if the other person is acting in good faith though, or unless someone needs a little slap on the wrist with a ruler in order to get them thinking/acting in a way that might be better.

    And I don't support information being available only to the motivated or technically capable as the first category is full of lunatics and the second is just technocratic elitism.

    I worry that the internet rather than provide people with access to information is providing people with too much wrong information and has actually resulted in huge swathes of people being turned into piles of brainworms, porn addiction and neuroses the likes of which have never been seen before in history.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago

    I worry that the internet rather than provide people with access to information is providing people with too much wrong information and has actually resulted in huge swathes of people being turned into piles of brainworms, porn addiction and neuroses the likes of which have never been seen before in history.

    I am mixed on this, I feel kinda this way but also literally everyone ever has felt this about their time and new technologies or trends. There is evidence that some people appear to be harmed by the light boxes of dopamine but evidence for broad harms is much less good. I can imagine worlds in which the internet was better, but also ones in which it is much worse. When we do look at stuff like worsening mental health outcomes in younger people it's a giant mess of correlated thing, from soc med to worsening economic outlook, climate disasters, reductions in freedom, reductions in physical activity, enclosure etc. To point the finger at any one and emphasise it feels reductive.

    If we have reasons to believe that making a technology is harmful we should not do that, but if a technology is available gatekeeping it behind something unrelated to potential to be harmful (e.g. in the votes case the ability to spin up a server. There is no reason to believe this correlates with sound judgement about exposing yourself to the information) is at best patronising. Generally elites have a really terrible track record of making decisions for other people. So I think once the genie is out of the bottle, absent strong evidence to do so, we need to give people access to it.

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  • [–] 8 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

    Haven't read the paper yet, but based on my personal experience in the barbaric wastelands of reddit and twitter I disagree. Imo the reason removing dislikes/downvotes works on hexbear is that you have strict rules and active/responsive mods that enforce them. I bet it takes a much higher than average (among lemmy communities) amount of work to build and maintain.

    In places where that isn't the case, downvotes are a decent stopgap for lazy mods.

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