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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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[–] 7 points 2 years ago (2 children)

America doesn't "do it", its a flaw of its democratic institution not a feature. For someone to invoke the privacy of their electoral vote with out acknowledging that, at least here, its not even private just exposes the writer as unserious.

To equate a vote on the bear form to voting for a representative is deeply unserious. Here there is only vote or don't vote, it's not even a question of downvoting and its implications.

The reality is the votes are already not private on the greater platform. By not showing the votes to users the platform is giving a smoke screen for vote harassment.

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

    Electoral votes are private in essentially all elections. The existence of an exception doesn't change the fact that most people have an expectation of privacy while voting. This clearly extends to internet forums or else we wouldn't be having this conversation.

    The reality is the votes are already not private on the greater platform.

    It is also possible to tally your total upvotes but the developers made a conscious decision for the site not to display this information. This is a lesson learned from reddit where you can observe toxic behavior from people trying to increase their karma score. It doesn't matter that you could technically do this on lemmy, you don't see the behavior because the design doesn't encourage it by default.

    Why does reddit and until now lemmy not show voting history? It's a lesson learned from digg where showing vote history results in tit for tat voting blocks where essentially no posts could rise organically on their own merits. The fact that moderators can see vote history already allows action against vote harassment without the possibility for voting blocks to emerge. Again it doesn't matter if some nerd can technically find a way to view the votes, without it being part of the default design the voting blocks won't naturally emerge as they did on digg.

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  • [–] 6 points 2 years ago*

    So I guess removing public likes and retweets on Twitter was a good move and not in service of protecting users from exposing themselfs as Nazis then.

    Digg is almost what, 20+ years old? That's almost three generations of platforms ago, we exist in a federated environment where each instance has it's own ecosystem and can selectively block entire swaths of the platform on ideological grounds or for petty reasons. Hell, users can block whole instances now. Were well beyond tit for tat spit spats over vote history at this point.

    Electoral votes are private in essentially all elections.

    Yes.

    The existence of an exception doesn't change the fact that most people have an expectation of privacy while voting.

    Yes.

    This clearly extends to internet forums or else we wouldn't be having this conversation.

    These are not even in the same universe. The only reason people expect that they are private is because they're private on reddit. They're private on reddit because reddit needs too be able to juice or squash front page content using their fuzzy vote counters.

    Reddit having public updogs would have given the whole game away. I remember when reddit didn't have a fuzzy vote counter and they quietly rolled it out. People we're not happy about it because it meant more opacity on the platform. It made it harder to know if people we're breggading posts and subs. People questioned the votes constantly.

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