YSK: Your Lemmy activities (e.g. downvotes) are far from private - eviltoast

Edit: obligatory explanation (thanks mods for squaring me away)…

What you see via the UI isn’t “all that exists”. Unlike Reddit, where everything is a black box, there are a lot more eyeballs who can see “under the hood”. Any instance admin, proper or rogue, gets a ton of information that users won’t normally see. The attached example demonstrates that while users will only see upvote/downvote tallies, admins can see who actually performed those actions.

Edit: To clarify, not just YOUR instance admin gets this info. This is ANY instance admin across the Fediverse.

  • chakan2@lemmy.worldEnglish
    154·
    1 year ago

    It discourages people from voting if they’re concerned about other people seeing their activity. This could result in a lower quality of scoring for posts.

    I strongly disagree with that. I think showing downvotes makes your votes more relevant. If something has 10k up votes and 10k down votes, it’s probably a decent post. If it just shows 10k up votes, or 0 net total, the score doesn’t reflect the nature of the post.

    At the individual level, it lets you know if someone is just trolling. That’s also a plus as far as reputation goes (not sure how people are scored here, or if they are).

    • OmniGlitcher@lemmy.worldEnglish
      151·
      1 year ago

      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.