Currently, almost anyone in the Fediverse can see Lemmys votes. Lemmy admins can see votes, as well as mods. Only regular Lemmy users can’t. Should the Lemmy devs create a way to make the votes anonymous?
There is a discussion going on right now considering “making the Lemmy votes public” but I think that premisse is just wrong. The votes are public already, they’re just hidden from Lemmy users. Anyone from a kbin/mbin/fedia instance can check out the votes if they are so inclined.
The users right now may fall into a false sense of privacy when voting because the votes are hidden from Lemmy users. If you want to vote something and not show up on the vote list, please create another account to support that type of content and don’t tell anyone.
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“If you have nothing to hide then you have nothing to fear.”
Given the strong presence of the privacy community on Lemmy, I have to say that I’m a bit shocked to hear so many in these discussions chiming in to support voting transparency.
I’m on board with the idea of using ring signatures to validate the legitimacy of a vote and moderating spammers based on metadata.
Or, for something (potentially) easier to implement, aggregating vote tallies at the instance level (votes visible to your instance admin and mods) and federating the votes anonymously by instance, so you might see something like:
- lemmy.world: 9 up, 2 down
- discuss.tchncs.de: 3 up, 4 down
- Etc
Up/down votes are the method of community moderation that sets Reddit apart from many other platforms. If the Lemmy community is trying to capture some of that magic, which is good for both highlighting gems AND burying turds, radical transparency isn’t the path to get there.
In fact, I’d argue that the secret ballot has already been thoroughly discussed and tested throughout history and there are plenty of legitimate examples of why it would be better if they were more secret than they are today.
Many people have brought up the idea of brigading, but would this truly get better if votes are public? Is it hard to imagine noticing that an account you generally trust has voted and matching their vote, even subconsciously?
For those who feel that they aren’t able to post on Lemmy because downvotes make you feel sad, my feeling is that if you make posts in a community and they consistently get down voted to oblivion, you’re in the wrong place. The people in that community don’t value your contributions, and you should find another place to share them. This is the system working as intended and the mods should be thankful that such a system has been implemented.
The last point I’ll make is about the potential for a chilling effect - making users less likely to interact with a post in any way due to a fear of retaliation. Look - if you’re looking for a platform where all of your activity is public, those are out there. Why should we make Lemmy look just like every other platform?
Agreed. 10/10.
And you don’t even need real crypto here to start. The home instance can just send vote actions as fixed unique tokens. The way the trust framework currently works, this is literally a drop-in replacement and introduces no new spam/brigade vulns which don’t already exist from a rogue instance. It would be imperfect, and may still make it possible to correlate and infer vote patterns for a sufficiently motivated adve, but it would raise the bar for protecting user telemetry by a huge factor with very minimal effort. I’m honestly a bit surprised it hasn’t been done already.
Is it hard to imagine noticing that an account you generally trust has voted and matching their vote, even subconsciously?
Not only is it not hard to imagine its easy to imagine the benefits of using this information automatically. I could imagine a client side script which re-ordered content based on who I trusted who had up or down voted it.
So I have users A B C D E F who are known to me who have voted on a given post. D and E are idiots I disregard their votes. F literally hates everything I love so I count his votes inversely. A and B are fantastic I count them x10 I tend to agree with C so I count his x2.
Not only can I potentially re-score threads and comments based on whom I trust I can if I really trust someone’s opinion apply their weights as well, and the weights of the folks upstream.
Yes, I too salivate at the idea that I could simply disappear all of the ideas I disagree with, but that is exactly how to turn a community into an echo chamber.
So I have users A B C D E F who are known to me who have voted on a given post. D and E are idiots I disregard their votes. F literally hates everything I love so I count his votes inversely. A and B are fantastic I count them x10 I tend to agree with C so I count his x2.
What you are suggesting here is, as I’m understanding it, a way to only get feedback from people you agree with and to never experience a critical discussion of ideas based on their merits.
Now, I’m not here to suggest that Lemmy is some kind of shining beacon of drama-free intellectualism, where every idea is discussed without bias or agenda, but I DO think it is valuable to hear from people whose lived experiences led them to a different conclusion than the one I’ve reached. Obviously there needs to be a mechanism to remove trolls from the discussion, but I fear a world where we only see content that we agree with, because then we will truly be removed from reality, and that’s not why I’m here.
There are a lot of people not worth attending to. If you do spend your time listening to these folks you don’t hear new ideas you hear the same bad ones over and over. It would be lovely that having noticed that someone is a persistent holocaust denier he could be added to a list that would disappear not only their contributions but their votes as well for thousands of users.
Sort by Top and I’m sure the crusaders of New will have everything sorted out by then. If you find these ideas being upvoted, you’re in the wrong community and you may be in a lemmygrad community. You’re on the wrong side of the train tracks and need to seek higher ground.
We don’t need to create literal echo chambers of people talking past each other because we block out any information that makes us uncomfortable. That’s not how we foster constructive dialog and
I want to have the ability to turn on my echo chamber, when I want it, and also to be able to turn it off, when I want to step outside of it for awhile. This doesn’t have to be a toggle - it could be having an alt on a different instance.
I don’t want this choice made for me by people who think they know better how to run my own life than me. They can write an appeal that I will consider, but ultimately I want to make my own choice.
Having votes be publicly viewable allows us all the freedom to do as we choose with that information - including to ignore them entirely. What I would probably do with it is make large block lists of people on lemmy.ml, since it turns out that user blocks of an instance don’t block all that much. Fwiw, for everyone I’ve blocked in the past, I look through the post history to see if they merely are being disagreeable on a particular matter but overall are capable of contributing something substantive to a conversation, or are nothing more than a troll, setting out to vomit their emotions upon everyone worldwide across the Fediverse.
I’ve been a mod before, on Reddit, and am under no illusions anymore that everyone is worth listening to - a downvote from someone rational I will give serious thought about, but an idiot is an idiot, even if a community mod hasn’t banned them (yet?).
It’s like autocorrect: feel free to make suggestions, but it would be nice if I could have control when I want it, including/especially not wasting my time.
Should the Lemmy devs create a way to make the votes anonymous?
I’m not sure if there is a good way to have the content federate anonymously. Even if there was, it would be a vector for spam.
Vote manipulation is a growing problem on Reddit. It’s only getting worse with all the AI spam bots and they don’t have an incentive to stop it. Why trust a review on Reddit if bots are upvoting/downvoting on behalf of a company, or worse what happens in news communities when a well funded group wants to change perspectives.
Admins need to know if the votes/likes coming in are legitimate, else they should block them. It’s too easy to abuse anonymous votes to affect how content is ranked.
I left a long comment in the other thread which I will link in a moment, but I think either
- We keep the current setup, but we put in more effort to make new users aware that vote records are visible to admins/mods
- We make it public for everyone and take steps to deal with the new issues that it could cause
Other comment on the benefits/issues: https://lemmy.ca/comment/11097046
The current trust model already relies on a user’s home instance accurately reporting user activity and not injecting fake activity. Hiding real user votes behind pseudonymous tokens doesn’t change that at all.
As far as I can tell, the activity ranking algorithms don’t actually differentiate between up and down votes anyway. All votes are considered engagement.
Always in favor of taking power from mods that they can abuse and simply do not need.
The 1 “You think you can come into MY instance, and downvote ME?” post I read was 1 too many.
The infallible Admiral Patrick perma-banned me from UnpopularOpinion for downvoting his posts. What a great guy - and by great guy, I mean twat.
I’m guessing we saw the same one, and that’s literally the only instance I’ve completely blocked.
Was it midwest.social by any chance?
No, vegantheoryclub.org actually
That’s funny because I saw some initial comments made which then started this discussion. And what you’re suggesting was the intent. The issue as they (one of Lemmy’s developers) said was essentially frustration that their echo chamber had been pierced.
On Lemmy the concern isn’t even mod abuse - it’s just how much user telemetry is pushed around in plaintext which makes me uncomfortable. I’m sure there are already instances which do nothing but listen to AP traffic actively building activity and interest profiles on Lemmy users. Say what you will, but at least on reddit they have to buy that shit. And if such a rogue admin is even a little bit enterprising, there are a bunch of potential IP deanonymization attacks possible by serving up content targeted to specific users during specific times of day. And probably a bunch of other shady shit I haven’t thought of.
Honestly it’s more than a bit suspicious to me that AP and Lemmy has put seemingly zero effort into mitigating this sort of thing.
The version code hasn’t even hit 0.2 yet. Lemmy was founded by people who got banned from Reddit for being too toxic & extremist leftists, so went off to make their own replacement. They do what they like, and bc Rust is a difficult language to work with, not that many are willing to help.
Then after Huffman’s debacle, we started to see Kbin, Mbin, Piefed, Sublinks, and perhaps more - but none even as advanced as Lemmy yet.
But more to the point, that’s just the nature of an open network. Wouldn’t Wikipedia suffer from the same issues? Though less of an issue than a social media framework I would wager.
I like your funny words, magic man!
I would rather vote identities being blocked from scraping. I don’t care about other users or admins. I would rather that level of information be unavailable to outside commercial sources, especially any timings based metadata that could be used to derive dwell time and other psychological metrics.
Thats probably a complete nonstarter in a federated network. The metadata needs to be sent via Activitypub, ergo it has to be public.
They should just stay mostly hidden as they are now. I was harassed 3 times while using kbin for my voting habits. When I brought it up to ernest, him and mostly everyone else defended it, even though at the time I was actively being annoyed by someone.
It’ll make less people vote in the long run and will scare people off.
Nothing worse than hopping on something I do for leisure to realize that thread I voted on a week ago has now come back to bite me in the ass because the OP decided to go on a crusade and harass everyone that downvoted them.
Please be vocal about this because I’ve seen two people say they didn’t see this behavior. ❤️
Even for delusional tech bro bullshit, the idea that public voting on an anonymous forum will do anything other than create drama is pretty fucking detached from reality.
yep, tyranny of the majority is still tyranny. It’s worth defending the 3% who disagree with the majority opinion cause, more often than not, sometimes the majority is wrong…
Defending the secret vote is the key to a functioning democracy, without it you just get cliques and in-groups who bully the outsiders. No one wins in that scenario, as critical thinking and critique are actively discouraged.
If OP mass-downvotes you, then ban them. As it is, you have the ability to mass-downvote them, without them even knowing that it is you doing it. Or maybe you wouldn’t do that, but some would - I hope you see how unequal that relationship is.
For anyone interested, there are a few papers on cryptographically secure voting, where both voter anonymity and election integrity are preserved.
Most designs consider three separate entities, where if you accumulate the information between those entities you would be able to identify a voter and his vote, but each entity on itself does not hold enough information.
Thanks @souperk@reddthat.com,
i believe many users will be interested in these papers about cryptographically secure voting.Amongst them there would be :
@rimu@piefed.social
@SorteKanin@feddit.dk
@brbposting@sh.itjust.worksNot sure if you are being sarcastic or not but I found this review.
https://www.mdpi.com/2073-8994/14/5/858
I had done some research about a year ago, but I don’t have the papers saved.
No I was not sarcastic. So now i am trying to read your paper and i think that it is above my knowledge level.
As a layman i had the intuition that instead of having two accounts as i proposed for voting and commenting which was implemented by @rimu, we might have had something like blockchain or filecoin or some coin that would represent voting power and that would be based on our commenting value… so that coin would have been an intermediary to make voting anonymous.
Finally i know enough about science that i know that i don’t know much.
Edit : after a rapid overview of the article i would say that this method :
“Blind Signature-Based e-Voting”
would be most appropriate to our social media voting and i noticed the work they have done is more targeting national elections where the outcome is much more important.
The problem isn’t keeping votes anonymous, that’s easy. The problem is bots/spam. You could just create a new instance and then upvote a post from another instance a thousand times. If the votes are anonymous for the other instance it’s tough to say if they are genuine users or just bots.
That’s the main issue here, when votes are anonymous you could easily just spam votes with no way to trace it back. If it’s a rogue instance then fine, you can ban the whole instance. But imagine if lemmy.world starts using fake votes in the background towards other instances.
What keeps from doing that right now? You can just create an instance and bot accounts on that
It would be damn easy to look up the instance and their “users” and see that the users are not genuine. Then ban the whole instance.
If you are worried about duplicates, aka a single bot spamming multiple votes, then that’s feasible to mitigate.
If you are worried about multiple bots spamming one vote each, that’s harder to mitigate and it comes down to how the instances handles bot accounts in general. IMO it’s best to ignore the bot problem and instead focus on designing a vote weighting system that favors similar instances.
designing a vote weighting system that favors similar instances
Would make the whole thing even worse, as I could create several new instances with 10 bot users each, then hammer out the votes.
The entire problem is that you can’t trace back each vote to a genuine user. It would be bad in case of fake instances that create 100 user accounts and upvote/downvote stuff, but you can ban the instance. It would be a disaster if a big instance creates fake votes (like lemmy.world suddenly adds 1000 fake users and uses them to manipulate other instances, if votes were anonymous you couldn’t check if it’s genuine lemmy.world users or fake accounts).
That’s interesting. I have read multiple comments to the effect that it would not be possible for lemmy to implement anonymous voting because the underlying ActivityPub protocol does not support it. So it sounds like solutions do exist, although I suppose the effort required to modify ActivityPub is too much, more likely the feature will be included in some successor to the fediverse.
Wow neat!! Eating our cake & having it
Thanks @A_A@lemmy.world
There is enough drama as it is. This will just open the door to shadowbanning and stalking and other horrors we have escaped by leaving reddit. It’s enough that it’s party available on kbin.
The developers of Lemmy do not seem interested in anything less than banning people instance-wide, even from communities that they have never posted in before, so ironically shadowbanning is too subtle for them.
But I thought the only way someone could be shadowbanned now is at the individual user level? It would be nice to increase transparency even further - e.g. a message pops up if you try to reply to someone saying like “this user has blocked you” (possibly everyone from that instance) so that people do not waste time trying to get a message across that the recipient will never read.
1 I had assumed votes were private 2 If I don’t hear soon that votes are private, I’ll simply stop participating and return to lurking. I’ll eventually just wander off to the next thing that doesn’t expose my votes to potential bots and/or abusive actors.
I think most users assume votes are private and most will have a similar reaction to learning about this unintuitive negative feature of anything built on ActivityPub, including Lemmy.
I think it is worth reading the actual discussion on github. Having votes public and having them visibly public on the web interface has compelling reasons. Namely enshittification hardening.
It’s also quite natural to stand by your words (or vote). I personally don’t think people should feel like the internet is their anonimized alt character of life. And if they need/want that, just do a throwaway account and hard vpn. Otherwise NSA (or equivalents) track us anyway.
Your votes are as public as your posts. I see you have no problem posting so I don’t understand what the issue is.
Right? Big whoop, votes are public. Oh no, people might find out I’m an an-com from my voting patterns, instead of from my comments
The issue is that currently someone can behave as a shithead via voting, even if not comments, with little fear of reprisal or even discovery.
How does one “behave as a shithead via voting”? If someone decided to waste their time following me around Lemmy and down voting my posts it’s not going to do very much.
The effectiveness of the shitheadiness is a separate matter from its identity:-). If someone were to say downvote literally everything you ever did, within seconds of you doing it, and regardless of content, then that would be a shitty thing to do.
When I first signed up for reddit, the upvotes and downvotes were not only separately tallied, but also showed the usernames of the most recent people who did them if you hovered over the button. Then very shortly after that they changed it so that it made votes private by default, and you could override it in the settings, but almost nobody went to check that box back on. Eventually, they completely removed that feature around the time upvotes and downvotes were combined into one. which along with vote fuzzing was one of the worst changes to reddit comments, imo.
Lemmy feels like old reddit right now, which is a great spot to be in. I don’t think you necessarily need public vote info, but maybe it could be enabled on a per-community basis? I can see some communities like politics not wanting to add additional drama to the equation while other more content driven communities might enjoy knowing who was giving the feedback.
Vote fuzzing is the worst. Reddit said their main reason for implementing it was to prevent vote manipulation… seriously? Vote fuzzing laid the groundwork for vote manipulation.
Do you mean manipulation from the admins? Because from the spammers perspective not being able to see if your votes went through is pretty inconvenient
One situation I’ve repeatedly faced that could be solved by fully public voting is having those debates when someone puts a single downvote on my opponent’s comments.
Silly, yes, but it may look like I am downvoting a person to aggravate. I am not, it’s not me! :D
deleted by creator
~you too :3~
I solve that by sometimes saying “upvoted” so it is clear that I am not downvoting them even if we disagree
Upvoted!
I’m at the completely opposite end of the spectrum of most people, they should be public to all. It makes it clear whether the guy downvoting you is doing so maliciously or as a non-participant. Same for upvotes. Otherwise, just get rid of it and find some better mechanism. The people saying “NO!” or that they should be anonymous don’t really have a reason, your comment history is already giving you away and no one has a problem with that.
The worst thing public upvotes/downvotes might lead to are the same things your comments are already profiled for by the same people that would and perhaps a random getting mad at your downvote or upvote and voting back, which doesn’t matter that much with the current karma system. The benefits, however, are a clear vision of where those upvotes and downvotes are coming from, without it you are a blind person in a social networks but with it you can tell who is interacting with you and you can investigate why and even make judgement calls because you can see whether they interact like a jerk.
No drama witch hunts, accountability for the way you are interacting online, the the benefits outweighs the drawbacks, but people don’t want it because they feel insecure about it. I specially favor it because it could be a first step for a form of crowdsourced moderation (speculated on it here), where you can choose the people you think are voting comments to your taste to eventually have a select group large enough to determine which should show up first and which shouldn’t show at all, and it could be completely complementary to existing systems. Don’t want to see “yes, I agree” comments sorting as the most relevant? You might choose people who do not upvote but have engaged with the rest of the thread for comments you consider more informative.
No one from kbin/mbin instances can check out the downvotes you make, since this attitude has been so widespread many don’t report it to those instances. They can see people who upvote, and the sky hasn’t fallen because of it. Anonymity largely only helps the minority making the drama remain hidden.
the world is an interesting place, the very reasons you gave “for” it is why I was against it. I don’t agree that it won’t cause witch hunts, and from the POV of the commentor it might be nice, but from the POV of the person who is giving the vote, it’s a severe downgrade.
Especially considering the fact that if the person downvoted but didn’t leave a comment afterward they likely would not have downvoted in the first place if it wasn’t anonymous because they don’t want to have to deal with the social interaction of someone trying to push them to explain further. Not everything needs a detailed this is why I feel this way, that’s why there is a upvo and down vote system in the first place, to prevent everyone from leaving a comment of I agree with this / I disagree with this / this is on topic / this is off topic
In addition to this, to say that no one’s giving reasons of why voting should be private, I don’t think that’s a truthful statement there are plenty of reasons that people have provided via privacy, security and sometimes just mental state.
You mentioned that you want to have a system where you choose what people you see and the people you don’t agree with don’t appear., I think that type of environment is extremely unhealthy for a social media platform. It’s why other platforms that have curated that content is starting to become a cesspool. I really don’t want to see lemmy become one big Echo chamber, it’s not healthy to have only one ideology that you see at all times and let’s face it that’s what that system you’re proposing would introduce.
Additionally the system your proposing is going to run into the same issue as the other websites that have attempted to do, this sort of system leads to new people inadvertently getting filtered out as untrustworthy, which will mean that they’re not getting activity on their posts/ comments as well which means that they’re just going to move on to another platform.
Honestly, I think I would rather just have the score system be removed as a whole then see that type of system implemented
I know that’s probably why you do, like I said, people feel really insecure about it. I don’t really respect irrational insecurity though. Your comment history could also lead to witch hunts, yet no worries there… If it does need to be handled, it should be done by automatically deleting your old up/downvotes and comments. But no one is asking for that with comments either… They only take in issue because they don’t want to be held accountable to their votes, even if the probability is practically zero and extremely exceptional.
If you really don’t want to explain why you are downvoting, I really don’t think people should be downvoting. I very rarely downvote, and there are plenty of comments I neither upvote or downvote simply because not everything should be rated nor am I capable of doing so. It is toxic.
You already have a system where people with alts and moderation privileges decide what you see and don’t see, this will happen regardless with information saturation. What I want to have is putting that in the hands of the users. Whether it will be good or bad will depend on the users, and because it would be complementary, you could still accept the traditional or default method. More choice is not bad, it is the users that make it bad, and in this case, they would make it bad only for themselves. But it would also be easy to work this system into something like https://ground.news , where as with a homogeneous imposition you don’t have a choice nor even an idea of what is being censored if you don’t go out of your way to find out. If it’s completely transparent, you could even look through the eye of another user’s moderation settings to see the sort of content they are getting.
Not sure where you are pulling the “new users get filtered out as untrustworthy”, the system I’m proposing would do not such thing. This seems more like a projected insecurity without specific examples that can be countered.
Without a karma system, the problem then goes back to which comments show up first and which might not show up at all. That’s just a traditional forum thread, where the newest comments do.
If you really don’t want to explain why you are down-voting, I really don’t think people should be down-voting.
there are many times that you can down-vote without a requirement of explaining. Sometimes your point has already been made by another person, other times it’s just a really bad take or the person is so dead-set that honestly you couldn’t change the persons mind even if you explained it. Sometimes the comment is just hostile to the current situation or the OP, sometimes the comment is just super off-topic. Some situations allow for down-votes without explaining it.
I personally down-vote for off-topic and harassing posts as it helps the system sort what is considered helpful to the discussion. I would refuse to down-vote for harassing and off-topic if this system is in place, as it creates an attack vector for the person to come after me, a situation that would require either blocking them or bugging a mod for, which is something that personally I just don’t want to deal with in my life so I would simply just not participate in the vote.
Not sure where you are pulling the “new users get filtered out as untrustworthy”,
The type of system proposed inherently causes it as a side effect. When you have a system that is crowdsourced from the popular opinion, you create an echo chamber that only shows content from sources that have been deemed as appropriate, as such not only do you lose the arguing side, you also lose content from people who are not established/just starting out as they are not profiled as that side. as for examples? Two examples of sites that use that style system include Stackoverflow, which uses a rep system to decide how much access you can get into, and some of the larger reddit sites which went off the karma system to even allow posting in them. There are also other examples in reddit, but the karma block system was the most predominant (followed by sub rule filters which filtered out based off bias).
I do believe that a karma system is best type of system however I believe that the metric should be hidden from sight. This will allow for helpful comments to rise to the top, but will remove the hard focus “score” ideology that everyone has. In this system you wouldn’t know if you were down-voted in the first place, which means you wouldn’t be aware of someone maliciously down-voting you, and it would also do what you want where it would force someone if they had a super big issue with what was posted to actually comment on it. That being said, this system can not exist in a federated environment so therefore the next best thing is either anonymous (to all but mods/admins due to moderation and federation control reasons) or just not having the system as a whole.
If those are your examples, then you are misunderstanding my proposition. Some of the reasons you suggest to downvote are not good reasons to me, but that’s point, everyone has their own criteria and their own preferences for the comments they would like to be reading over others. By denying them the ability to choose, you are imposing an arbitrary and fallible karma system. Hiding it really doesn’t fix it, you are denying the alternative because you feel the absolute worst case will occur. Yet right now it is possible, and does not happen.
Its best if the rules are the same for anyone, but public votes is something power hungry mods will eventually abuse. If you dare upvote the wrong post you will get banned.
It sounds like everyone but mods should be able to see voters. But of course they will use straw accounts. What if only votes on your own post/comment were revealed to you? Like some pointed out, they are already not anonymous to anyone who wants to try hard enough to get the data because of federation. So the question is who do we want to be able to see that data easily? It’s a GUI modification in any case. Who are we making the gui modification for?
All it will take is for folks to look and see you voted in something and they won’t see the context or will misunderstand your intentions and they’ll ban you. This shit happened back on Reddit too and it sucked. They’d blanket ban people who interacted in a community without looking at what you actually did.
Sounds like mods and admins can already do this, and if the barrier to entry to being an admin is firing up a Docker container, I don’t see the purpose in restricting users from seeing it
Yes they should, unfortunately I don’t think that’s technically possible with the fediverse model as the servers have to communicate that info over Activity pub, at least that’s my understanding of it.
It’s not technically possible with any model. Votes on Reddit are only kept private from other users – staff could look them up or reveal them to someone any time they wanted and you’d never know.
Even if you allowed voting without an account (which would be so easily manipulated that it would be worthless), you’d still be identifiable from your IP.
On Kbin the votes are 100% public for anyone. I’ve migrated to Lemmy after the frequent server issues with Kbin and I miss that part dearly. It was very easy to gauge whether someone was engaging in a good or bad faith discussion by checking the votes within a discussion. That being said, personally I’m very light on my downvotes, and I can see how someone more trigger-happy would see it as worrying. Personally I see the vote transparency as healthy though.
To be fair, there’s a point to be made that someone who’s overly trigger-happy on dislike should be shamed for it. Just like you would be if you kept being snide to everyone in real life.
I agree that transparency would do much more good than harm, plus compared to the info that people already put in their profiles/comments, it’s not likely to make them anymore identifiable.
I’d even argue public votes can deescalate some situations, for example where both sides of a relatively heated discussion can see they vote each other up. They don’t necessarily agree but they appreciate the other side’s points.
As for the transparency, it’s not possible to list all the votes of a user, one rather needs to list votes on a given post. To profile a given user the attacker would need to cross-reference the data from all posts and comments which is computationally infeasible, both client-side and server-side.
I am the admin of a website where we have a place where our users can post custom content and rate the content of others.
We have discussed how it works and should work many times and came to the conclusion that we’d never want it to be public. Any report of abuse will be checked by the website owner directly in the database and even admins don’t have full access. Everybody tries to stay as far away from the personal ratings as possible.
We also noticed that it would be a lot more fragile when there are not many voters. A whole group that is negative about something wouldn’t get as much harassment as a single person having a unique opinion.
On our website we have a comment section that isn’t anonymous, and we even noticed that people often don’t post something negative when it would be obvious that they are the only one who has voted/rated something. (“Negative” is almost always constructive in our case)
These are just a few things that I think add to this discussion.
