Fact is, the Lemmy ecosystem needs money to handle the growing server reqirements as more people migrate as well as the development cost of new features (I know Lemmy is OSS but the devs should still get some compensation for their effort).
Seeing how much some reddit users love awards so much that they cant stop giving money to Reddit to award posts protesting the api change, this could be a great way for users to voluntary support the ecosystem. It can be easily ignored by users not caring about them (clients could even add an option to hide them), but users liking the feature can go wild and this time the money goes to volunteers keeping this alive instead of greedy admins, power mods and investors.
Though there would be some big organization questions attached: attached:
- Which server handles the payment? A centralized one, the one where the post was made or the one where the user giving the award account was created.
- How will the money be shared between the Devs and the individual instances in a way that is fair but cant be abused easily.
I’m still just not sure how I feel about Kbin
Also allowing people to see who downvoted (sorry, “Reduced”) them can’t be a good idea as the site grows and attracts more trolls/unsavoury individuals.
I don’t understand your argument, wouldnt transparency in voting EXPOSE trolls? Pretty sure they’ve already caught some shenanigans that wouldn’t have been so obvious without this functionality. So many instances (and even subreddits) just hide the downvote button, with the transparency if you dont like it dont downvote maybe install an extension that always hides the downvote button for just you.
So, the problem is that seeing who downvoted you lets a certain type of person track down and stalk people who disagree with them. Not only could your inbox get filled with “Why’d you downvote me bro?”-messages, it could lead to these people following others around to unrelated comment threads and harassing them as “retaliation”.
I take it these people haven’t found Kbin in any significant numbers yet and so it hasn’t been a problem, but I’d be wary for the future.
Let me ask this question instead. What value does it add to know who downvoted you?
Trolls know why they’re being downvoted; for reasons I don’t understand, they seem to enjoy it.
You probably shouldn’t be downvoting people having a good-faith discussion, but if you do, the venn diagram of people having a good-faith discussion and unstable enough to harass someone for downvoting them is probably pretty small. Small enough for the block function to mitigate it.
Flip it around. Anonymous downvotes would let anyone spin up a lemmy instance, fill it with sockpuppet accounts, and downvote everything by hundreds or thousands of downvotes, and it would be impossible for users to know the difference.
You’re right, it wouldn’t be questions about why the downvote so much as just straight insults probably. I’m too hesitatant to use that sort of language so I didn’t represent the type of message properly.
So the primary argument for why public downvotes are beneficial is that it helps prevent spam-infuencing posts and comments? Is this then not more of a problem with bot detection? And just how easy is it really to “just spin up an instance and fill it with sock puppet accounts”?
I don’t know that I’d call it the primary argument, just an argument. And containerization makes hosting your own lemmy instance trivial.
Personally, if it makes people a little more judicious about applying a downvote, maybe that’s a good thing.
What would you say is the primary argument?
I don’t know by what metric I’d even use to quantify that. Why do you need one?
To form an opinion I like to hear arguments from both sides. I can come up with my own arguments as to why public downvotes might be bad (anonymous voting is a cornerstone of democracy, hidden votes makes engagement easier for socially shy individuals, aforementioned harassment), but I have a harder time finding its positives.
This isn’t meant to be combative; I have tried thinking about ways I would use this information (apart from reporting bot spam) and none of them would add anything positive to my experience using the platform. If anything it could lead me to be unhealthily obsessed with checking activity for who upvotes and downvotes me. My experience doesn’t equate to everyone though, so I’m curious to hear another perspective. I might very well be missing something big.
Now? A bit troublesome. Soon enough, as the tooling improves? Trivial.
You don’t even need to spin up a Lemmy instance specifically. There’s some very small script-driven ActivityPub servers already showing up that can be used for this kind of activity with ease if you’ve got a minor amount of technical chops. Give it a few months and someone will have turnkeyed an ActivityPub harassment engine.
You can block people like that. And you will be able to see that they’re “retaliating” against you because of the transparent voting system - you’ll be able to say to the admins “look, this guy’s done nothing over the past six hours except downvote every comment I’ve ever written” and if you’re on an instance that cares about such things he can be taken care of.
I understand that but those things are added discomfort and hassle. If voting was anonymous, they would not be able to identify me and thus I wouldn’t have an insult in my inbox to wince at before blocking the user and I wouldn’t have my page full of retaliatory downvotes to report to an admin.
These aren’t world ending flaws, but they are the trade-off. The negative downside to public voting. But what is the upside? What is the user level benefit I’m getting that makes tolerating the downside worth it?
Well, one upside is that it lets voting be a thing, since ActivityPub is public by nature.
It should be possible to build bots to detect these voting patterns. Reddit had plenty of user-created bots that helped moderators identify toxic or otherwise undesirable users to ban, something like that could be done in the Fediverse too. It’s pretty early yet - there isn’t even an API for Kbin as far as I’m aware - but once something like that is in place you might not even notice when your stalker gets caught.
I mean I wouldn’t call that an upside in this context since the argument starts from the basic assumption that up/downvotes exist.
If votes by nature have to be public due to necessary operations of the ActivityPub protocol the entire argumentation becomes meaningless.
I still maintain that I prefer making accessing this this information harder rather than easier. Yes, a dedicated user can still spin up their own instance and check, but that added bothersome task is going to be enough to deter a lot of people.
It’s kind of like a door lock. You can’t stop anyone from getting into your house if they really want to, but locking your front door still reduces the risk of having your possessions stolen due to the added friction.
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”.
I love this idea of “retaliatory downvotes”. People take fantasy Internet points so ridiculously seriously!
Edit: Nevermind, you answered this below.
Is strikeout a thing? Let’s see. Edit2: Nope.
~~I’m curious as to what your actual concern is here. Like, what do you imagine will happen?~~
KBin just shows the data that the ActivityPub protocol sends. Anyone could create their own instance and see all reduces.
I know that, and they could, but an average user isn’t going to do that.
I think the ActivityPub protocol should be adjusted so voting is anonymous, but maybe I’m in the minority there.
An average user isn’t an unsavoury troll.
I don’t see how ActivityPub could be adjusted so voting is anonymous. Not without letting instances just make up whatever vote totals they want with no way to tell that something shady is going on.
(Actually, I can think of one way to do it, but it’s very complex and involves blockchains so I wouldn’t expect an average user to want that either).
I swear I saw something about it on GitHub but this is all beyond my competencies so I will defer to the experts.
I think it would be desirable if it was anonymous, or at least less easy accessible. But as I said elsewhere, I’m open to change my mind, it’s possible I’ve just missed the value added by it.