Your votes on Reddit are public to Reddit admins. On Lemmy anyone can be an admin.

Which is my concern. I don’t like Reddit having and selling that data, but it’s easier for me to trust-ish a singular entity than some entire web of random people, which probably includes some corporate people siphoning data anyway. I know some would likely find that a tad paradoxical, but that’s how my brain works. At least then the corporation can be held accountable per the standards of the region they’re based in should there be issues, or users can mass target the corporation rather than go “Don’t like it, just move to another instance.”.

For reference, it’s still not ideal, but I’d somewhat trust my instance’s admin. Why can’t my vote history be shared purely with them? Then give other admins the raw upvote/downvote data of the post/comment. After all, the instance I choose my account to be on is my decision.

Your Lemmy name shouldn’t be tied to your real name.

It’s not. I am careful about what I put online. Whilst I’m uncertain as I’ve never particularly tried to do so beyond some cursory Googling, I’m pretty sure you can’t tie my username back to me IRL. But even so, there’s no need to add to the pile of potentially traceable publically available data.

The purpose behind having votes be more public is to have some kind of reputation behind those votes.

That can still be anonymised behind a hashed ID. If all my votes were registed to some User-XXXX and it wasn’t possible to retrieve my username from that, I’d have no issues. Though from my discussion with other people, it seems that’s counter to how ActivityPub intrinsically works. I’m increasingly working towards the opinion that the fediverse isn’t for me, if it’s all set up in a similar fashion and apparently unchangeable. As they say, “different strokes for different folks” I guess.

But don’t do it as a protest. Do it because you don’t want to share that data publicly.

I mean yeah, that’s what I’d do it for. It’s a suggestion for the site and it’s a sentiment that seems to be shared by several people here, but it ultimately falls down to me to decide whether or not I want to continue using it, much the same as with my usage of Reddit.

If you’re worried about people collecting that data, then you shouldn’t have put it in public.

Voting is a core functionality of the site. It’s something I don’t think should be public as it puts more emphasis on what content I interact with in what is now apparently a public manner. If you want to debate that a mere vote is something I shouldn’t put in public, then fine, you do you. But for me, it defeats half the point of me even having an account here. What one comments on are often an incredibly small portion of what one actually votes on simply by ease of voting.

And I know I said “But Reddit…!” is a bad argument earlier, but even so, I’d like to say that even Reddit’s voting is not publicly accessible (as in not accessible by other users, even if Reddit almost certainly collects and sells such data), so clearly there should be ways to do it. If ActivityPub requires public voting and the people who have the ability to change it are unwilling or even unable to do so, then fair enough. But equally, I will refrain from contributing to such a site, which seems like a bit of a shame when it seems close to ideal otherwise.

You are the one putting the burden the change something to your liking on others instead of doing to yourself.

To some degree yes. However, I am simply a user. I have no idea where to even begin with attempting such a thing, and whilst I’m sure I could probably find out, even if I did it would take far longer to learn, nevermind getting it adopted. It’s a lot easier for the people running the site and who have knowledge of how to do so. It’s like going to a restaurant, not liking the way they’ve done the food, so the restaurant comes back with “Cook it yourself then”. The other “solution” is of course going to a different restaurant or simply not going to a restaurant. which if:

your ideas are not compatible with ActivityPub

is truly the case, then it would seem that that is the only viable option for me personally.

And all of that because people could be mad about a downvote

I don’t care how people vote me. This isn’t strictly about downvotes, it’s about specifc content engagement.

And I really can’t imagine that your vote on a post with a pseudonym is really a very useful datapoint for anyone.

It’s potentially useful to someone. And I’d just rather not have that data public anyway, it’s just that simple. Enough data is already public, what types of content you actively engage with and how you engage with it also being public is just a bad idea in my opinion. These are core analytics almost any site collects, which imply they must have a purpose. Except here it’s public, and can also be swooped up by big companies should they dedicate a tiny fraction of computing power to run an instance.

I agree that these things have to be communicated better but I don’t even know how we would make people aware of this.

Making these things directly accessible to end users would be a start. Have a stats button that shows who precisely voted what. Hiding this shit in the backend is just blatant obfuscation.

You’d have to change the specification there. That is possible but it will take some time.

Then they should do so, these issues need to be fixed ASAP.

Still you’d need a way to make votes not bound to a user and still hard to spoof.

Obfuscating user IDs via a hash or something would seem like the way to make it work. I’m not a professional programmer, I only know a little bit of python, so I have no idea if I’m talking nonsense on that front. And whilst still not an ideal solution, but sharing non-private votes with your own instance admin and have them share only the total vote count with other instances is another solution. That way you need only trust your instance admin, which is choosable and can also be yourself.

That is what it means. If you have one then go ahead.

Putting the onus on me is a shitty thing to do. I’m not the one running this site in any capacity, but this is an issue that many users are unhappy with. If the issue with the site won’t or even can’t be fixed, then I will simply not use the site. I don’t know how many people feel the same on that front, but I’d imagine there’s quite a few.

Agreed, I am incredibly confused by what seems to be the majority reaction to this.

I’ve never been particularly involved with the FOSS community, though I do use a few FOSS apps and generally appreciate their view on what FOSS means. I also strongly appreciate data privacy, and it was my observation that the FOSS community was (generally) relatively the same way. So to see this reaction is very surprising. It’s quite literally the same terrible argument of “Why fear it if you have nothing to hide” used against multiple data privacy concerns throughout the years.

I think the worst are the bad faith “But Reddit…!” arguments. For one, we’re not on Reddit anymore, this is about Lemmy’s issues that can be corrected. And for two, whilst Reddit potentially outsourcing that data to the highest bidder is far from ideal, at the very least the data wasn’t outright PUBLIC to anyone who wishes to set up a simple server.

Ah yes, because the practical option is to be constantly switching accounts and instances based on what you want to look at for 5 minutes each.

I agree with what you’re saying, but that’s not the point of this post. This post is about the fact that an individual user’s vote history is semi-public.

i.e. if you were to upvote my comment, anyone who owns an instance would be able to see it was you who upvoted it. Likewise for if you downvote it.

Whilst I’m sure there are those who don’t care, I’d personally rather not have any rando who can be bothered to set up a Lemmy instance know what I’ve voted on. I’d honestly rather just not vote.

This sounds like a very different show to the one this post is about.

Essentially my thoughts going into this as well. I was hoping it would strike a vibe similar to “Senpai ga Uzai Kouhai no Hanashi (My Senpai is Annoying)” with alternative roles, but so far I’m relatively unimpressed.

I was planning to watch the whole season as the trailer and premise seemed nice, but I may have to bump it down to 3 episodes.

Oh really? I did a cursory search of Hot as I assume that’s where it would be, so I guess I just missed it. Sorry about that!

I’ve tried to play the games, but unfortunately I just couldn’t get into them. I’m glad to hear it’s a faithful adaptation at least, I hope they cover the majority if not all the content then, and I also hope the story is good too.

As for fan-service, I’m not sure they will. It seems Ryza and thighs are somewhat synonymous these days, and I’m sure they’ll play into that as much as they can. But we’ll see I guess.

My logic behind joining lemmy.world was that defederation may be an issue, current or future, therefore it made sense to join the one that for one has the most people, and for two is the least likely to be defederated or randomly defederate others.

Granted, I believe beehaw did in fact defederate .world, and I think it was not long after, so maybe I did choose poorly.

I was tempted to join feddit.uk, but I wasn’t sure if that would put the unnecessary identifier of “This guy’s probably British!” on me everywhere I go.

do the rules apply to the instance where you have your account, or to the instance where you’re posting/commenting?

That is essentially what I was asking. It kind of seems like it’s both, but I’m no fediverse expert.

I guess it really just depends how much of a stickler the lemmy.world mods are, and/or if they have any way of finding out I’m linking to stuff like that.

Not sure where to ask this, so I’ll ask here. Linking to pirate sites (not content) is okay here as I understand it. However my account is with Lemmy.world, which in its “rules” specifically states “Protect our community from harassment, malicious or illegal content”. Would I technically be at the whim of Lemmy.world by linking to pirate sites, or do I have some leeway here?

In no particular order:

• The CEO Spez decided to edit comments that were directed at insulting him to insult that subreddit’s moderators instead (it was a Trump subreddit, but even so), with no indication that the comments had been edited.

• Reddit’s redesign, barely anyone who used the old design likes the new one. At least they kept the old one.

• Removal of exact Upvote/Downvote numbers like we have here only giving an overall “score”. Later followed by obfuscation of the true value, supposedly due to bot vote manipulation.

• The “jailbait” subreddit, which featured images of girls who looked close to being or actually underage, and some likely WERE underage, was allowed to exist for an extended peiod of time. Reddit also gave the guy that ran it “a gold-plated bobblehead doll “for making significant contributions to the site.”” reportedly.

• Installed an interim CEO, Ellen Pao, who was there solely to take the blame for some controversial changes like banning some fairly popular if not great subreddits. It was later revealed that wasn’t even her decision.

• Ellen Pao was also put under fire for supposedly firing Victoria Taylor, who is a very connected individual and was responsible for many of the site’s celebrity/notable people AMAs (Ask Me Anything), including guiding them through the interface and what not so they could capably deliver said AMAs. She was actually fired by Alexis Ohanian, who is one of the founders of Reddit, has worked there on and off, and is currently Executive Chairman from what I can see.

• That time Reddit as a community decided to hold a witchhunt over the Boston Marathon bombings and misidentified the culprit. Not really the admins fault technically, but it could perhaps have been prevented by them.

• The rampant issues with bots, most of Reddit’s top posts of the day and their initial comments are entirely reposted content by bots. Very little seems to be done to remove them.

• Also the rampant issues with power users and power moderators. Why exactly can one individual be put in charge of hundreds of semi-popular/popular subreddits?

• In addition to the site redesign, the implementation of things like a chat function on top of the DM function, NFTs, Reddit Premium, different rewards and tiers other than Gold (Reddit Silver used to be a joke for those who didn’t want to do Gold), online statuses, avatars, coins, and probably some other stuff I’m forgetting, were all generally unwanted. Most didn’t cause that much of a controversy, but I don’t know anybody who wouldn’t be happier if they were gone.

Probably something else I’m forgetting, but that’s what I remember most.

I mean, the same was true with Reddit. The only difference here is that communities can have the exact same name so long as they’re on a different instance.

Is this really a surprise to anyone? Github isn’t exactly a piracy friendly site.

I also think there’s an element of time spent with Reddit. For some of us who’ve been with the site for over a decade, this is the last straw with Reddit. For many others, its their first incident.

My Reddit Cakeday used to be nothing special. It’s June 30th. There’s a certain irony behind all this somewhere.

I agree. I personally found the system was far too addictive, in the Cookie Clicker kind of way of “bigger number = happy”. I sometimes find myself missing it almost, only to remember that it’s worthless.

It also means I can more freely share my actual opinions, without that reflecting on some sort of global score if people generally dislike said opinion.

It’s a novel idea, I can certainly see the nice implications of it, but it also seems incredibly excessive. Would you really going around flagging every user you see on a trust system? Or even enough for the system to be moderately effective? And then expect many other users to do the same?

I honestly don’t think I’d use it, blocking people is enough for me.