i’ve seen quite a few users with one downvote on every single comment for no reason and it makes me wonder if people are disagreeing, stalking users, or just a weird bot account.
i’ve seen quite a few users with one downvote on every single comment for no reason and it makes me wonder if people are disagreeing, stalking users, or just a weird bot account.
Now, this is interesting. As far as I know, all of the public threadiverse softwares specifically hide this info (especially downvotes), while acknowledging that the way ActivityPub works, the information is public anyway and you’re really just making it slightly less accessible. An open service like this essentially removes all of the supposed barriers (e.g. “Most users don’t know how to set up their own instance in order to see downvotes.”) which are claimed to keep this info private.
What kind of effect does knowing exactly which people downvoted you have on a platform? Is there a chilling effect on downvotes, is there revenge downvoting? I guess we’ll find out. It’s less easy to see the upsides of knowing this info, beyond being able to confirm whether or not you’re being stalked by persistent downvoters.
@[email protected] Did you have any particular thoughts around the ethics of this tool when you decided to make and share it? Not trying to call you out in any way, just interested to hear how you feel about it. Ultimately, if it wasn’t you it would be somebody else, so the direct impact is probably negligible.
Thanks for the question, I believe the illusion of privacy is worse than the lack of privacy. Currently, non-technical users or newbies think that their votes are private, which they are definitely not. Someone could spin up an instance and see the votes, which users cast without thinking about how private they really are.
I will also write a blog post about this tool and its ethics.
Nice, I’ll look forward to reading that, thanks!
Your point re: the illusion of privacy makes sense. Most Lemmy/other threadiverse users are probably used to platforms where that data is not public and I don’t think any of the softwares really highlight that it’s different here. It’s easy to get a false impression of privacy.
Yeah Lemmy should make it clearer that your votes are not private
Other software like Piefed you actually do get private votes.
Its a bit easier than just pasting the link into friendica.
It’s not like we haven’t had public downvoting in the fediverse yet. We already found out in the past.
Kbin had public downvotes and the main effect was that people put more thought into their downvotes. While I assume it wasn’t without abuse, I’ve never seen it brought up as an active problem, just something that could theoretically happen.