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

The potential for drama is chefs-kiss

Now when people get into a spat they will be able to compile a list of everyone who sides with their enemy or agrees with them sicko-mega

Personally, admin can already see votes if we need to purge reactionaries which is plenty of transparency as far as I'm concerned. Although imagining a big struggle session on here with public upvotes is very funny, I'll admit

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    [–] 54 points 2 years ago

    Yeah, we used this to check for people mass down voting trans users and then banned them(then down votes was removed)

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

    Personally? I don't want it unless I can toggle a setting that makes my likes private. I don't want to wake up to 50 messages because I liked something that I wasn't supposed to because I was half asleep and didn't know the entire post history of a user.

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

    I'm going to get roasted for forgetting to upbear the threads i post in

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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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    [–] 46 points 2 years ago (7 children)

    Yes absolutely this needs to happen. This will be hugely helpful for establishing accountability for people who upvote awful posts.

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  • [–] 46 points 2 years ago

    This is definitely going to add to the mental health problems of the type of people who obsess about this shit.

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

    Sounds like a big potential for harassment. The drama sounds fun, and so do the bits, but we already know that marginalized groups struggle with harassment on lemmy. I'd want to hear from people who are more knowledgable of how harassment works on lemmy or have experienced it to learn what their concerns are.

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  • [–] 45 points 2 years ago (5 children)

    I’d like mods to be able to see it. If I imagine an interaction with a random user commenting on my upvotes, I can’t help but imagine this being the most tiring person in the world.

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    [–] 41 points 2 years ago

    As well as being poor for opsec, without a very clear use case, I think this would just create more anxiety in people. I don't see it making for a happier nicer community.

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

    Broke: Making upvotes public so people are held accountable over what they upvote.

    Woke: Taking away upvotes so people have to comment if they agree with a post.

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    [–] 37 points 2 years ago (6 children)

    People have to like my posts enough to want to stamp their names publically by voting them? Gonna find out who's brave enough to be seen upbearing autistic nerd shit.

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    [–] 32 points 2 years ago (7 children)

    This really should be the norm. If you look at old phpbb sites and the like generally when you “like” or “find a post helpful” or whatever they call it they will list the users who have liked a post.

    This whole anonymous voting thing is again a redditism that lemmy devs need to break free from.

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    [–] 31 points 2 years ago (5 children)

    I say Do it, when the admins here did it to ban all the transphobes a year ago it made the site way better, plus i dont think it will reduce votes.

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    If you want to publicly support a statement, that's what comments are for. Upvotes are for privately agreeing with statements or marking them as read.

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

    Remove upbears along with downbears. Return to forum posting.

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  • [+] 29 points 2 years ago* (last edited 1 year ago)
    [+] 28 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 child)
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    [–] 27 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

    IDK basically our votes were nonconsensually used to police behavior by mods back in the @TransComrade69@hexbear.net days and it made me feel real prickly even though I didn't really have anything to fear. I've basically assumed my votes were as good as public this whole time with the assumption mods could on-a-dime choose them to be.

    I think HB has an echo chamber problem and I don't think this kind of policy helps that at all.

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  • [–] 25 points 2 years ago (20 children)

    I'm going to be real with you. I've been able to see all votes on lemmy publicly for years. You should just make them public, because I've been scraping you and collecting statistics on how much you use bots.

    Just make them public or I'm the only one who can do this. Your choice. Being helpful for fun here.

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    [–] 24 points 2 years ago

    This absolutely should happen. Make people accountable without the need for moderation action.

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  • [–] 23 points 2 years ago

    Oh this is gonna be really funny if it happens

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  • [–] 21 points 2 years ago

    Stoked to open up all new ways to dunk on people

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  • [+] 21 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)
    [–] 20 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    I've upvoted every single bad post on this site and I fear being hunted Wild Wild West style via saw blades magnetically called to my location, so I have mixed opinion on this.

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  • [–] 20 points 2 years ago (4 children)

    An average user absolutely benefits from being able to see who voted on a post or comment and what their vote was. A person noticing that someone is actively down voting their content in a deliberate way empowers the user to have it dealt with. Mods might not queue into that kind of targeted harassment.

    All these comments comparing a vote on Lemmy to a vote within a democratic election are incredibly juvenile frankly. Its reductionist when saying Electoralism is equivalent to a Lemmy Vote and egotistical when saying a Lemmy Vote is equivalent to a ballot cast in a democratic election.

    Your vote isn't private in either case regardless. At most you need to know someone's birthday, first name, and last name to find someone's voting record in America (might depend state by state). Someone willing to set up a Lemmy instance to see your votes is also capable of then setting up bots to specifically target you with down votes, which is the more egregious of the two actions.

    Given the ease in which someone could create a bot network for the purpose of targeting someone or a group of people with a downvote campaign, I think it's only just to allow regular users the power to see votes and act on that information. Why should this information be gate kept to only the technically capable?

    Keeping votes "hidden" maintains a kind of voyeuristic experience for those with the power or technical knowledge and resources while maintaining this illusion of privacy for the masses.

    Make them visible to all.

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