2y ago

Interesting difference from Reddit: Upvotes/Downvotes are not anonymous

Hey folks! Just realized something that makes Lemmy different from Reddit. Because of the federation, your votes are not technically anonymous on Lemmy. At least, I think.

Although there’s no UI to look at a user’s voting history yet, one could conceivably be built by an instance. Perhaps coincidentally, I hear there’s instances out there populated by mostly bots?

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They're definitely not anonymous, and Kbin actually does have the UI to show who is upvoting and downvoting any post if you view it on there.
- I love it. I've already used that feature to block someone who was stalking my posts and downvoting them. Then I got curious and checked out a bunch of posts on the front page that had downvotes but didnt really warrant them. I found there were about 5 accounts who were heavy downvoters for apparently no reason. They also got blocked.
  
  I agree, I think it's useful! I also blocked a person yesterday who was downvote stalking me, they clearly didn't want to see the things I was posting anyway.

From a technical standpoint, it's not different from Reddit. The only difference here is that normal people can host their own instances, whereas Reddit is only hosted by the company and they can keep it under wraps.
- Agreed from a technical standpoint.
  But the implications are still interesting. One might (big might) trust Reddit as an organization not to use this data for evil, but with federation, there’s nothing stopping an instance from simply releasing all users’ voting history to be public.
  Of course, my instance didn’t even ask for an email to sign up, so my entire account is anonymous that way.
  I wonder if there are technical ways to federate votes anonymously?
  
  but with federation, there’s nothing stopping an instance from simply releasing all users’ voting history to be public.
  Which kbin.social does.

When us older folks say "Anything you put on the public internet should be considered public and recorded forever", it's because of that.

9 comments