As it was recently discussed a lot of the data you generate while using the fediverse is public. If we’re looking at the threadiverse even more of it is public including your votes.
I only know the specifics of Mastodon and mbin, so maybe @rimu@piefed.social @nutomic@lemmy.ml @julian@community.nodebb.org and other devs can chime in here.
Voting on Mastodon is a lot more private than voting in the threadiverse. Only the author of a post (and their instance) knows everyone who voted on a post. Everybody else can retrieve the total numbers, but not the individual votes. Of course this comes with the downside that everyone else has to fetch this data and while the instance could send an Update activity - informing other instances that the numbers changed - Mastodon currently does not do that.
In the threadiverse on the other hand, every single vote gets send around the network, including all the details.
I would like the threadiverse software to get a bit better at privacy. Mastodon is often restrictive with activities for that exact reason and while I do not want to completely screw visibility by not sending anything to anyone, I think the visibility of votes can be improved a lot.
So my proposal would be: votes are only sent to the author of a post. The author then sends an Update activity to their followers and the magazine the post belongs to. The magazine then announces this Update activity to all its subscribers. The post object has to contain the relevant numbers of course and Mastodon and PeerTube use shares, likes and dislikes (PeerTube only). These properties then contain a Collection with a property called totalItems and not a list of the people who actually voted, that would defeat the purpose (looking at you PeerTube)
Because nobody wants to break federation with other software, it would be nice if this could be coordinated between all the threadiverse actors
It’s not clear why voting should be private when posting is not. Your posts reveal much more about you than your votes. Voting only signals to other people that you believe the content is good/a waste of time. Eventually, the arguments for anonymous posting/voting are the same.
It is a problem that it is obfuscated that votes are public. When people don’t know that, then they may be tricked into revealing things they might not otherwise.
I believe there is a place for both anonymous and pseudonymous posting/voting, but not for half measures. Anonymous and pseudonymous posting shouldn’t be mixed. That just opens the floodgates for all sorts of manipulative practices.
The main reasons for me:
- People are not used to votes being public, because (afaik) it was just not this way on “traditional” social media (there only the operators might have had access)
- Votes being public affects far more users than posts, because only a small subgroup of all users actually post anything
- Votes being private is (imo) much more achievable, as they contain the same message each time either “I like” or “I dislike”, more information than that is not conveyable in up- and down-vote-buttons
-
The problem with trad SoMe is that it is monopolistic. That’s because these companies “own” the data and gate-keep access. If you want open social media, you must not have a gate-keeper. Which means that you can’t have someone who controls access. That’s a fundamental trade-off.
-
So what? Should posts be anonymous as long as they are short?
-
No. It’s always data+owner. It doesn’t matter if the data is only a single bit.
- Doesn’t change the fact that people are used to their votes not being seen by other users
- Don’t know what that has to do with me saying that more people vote than post
- of course it is easier with always the same one bit information as it is for something that can be one word or 50k words that are basically never the same. Plus the fact that people want the things they post to be seen, but not necessarily their votes
-
Yes, people are used to monopolistic social media. Doesn’t mean that there shouldn’t be an alternative. There simply are a lot of things that you cannot do without an authority that grants or denies access to data. If you want the advantages of openness, you have to accept the downsides.
-
I don’t know how that is an argument for anything. If people are more comfortable voting and not posting, maybe we should make posting anonymous.
-
Repeating a rejected assertion is not going to convince. You strip the username from data. Give me some reason why it would be easier when the data is short. People want their posts to be seen. That doesn’t mean they want their usernames seen.
-
-
I prefer to receive individual vote activities because then my blocks and defederations will remove votes from instances that I don’t want.
e.g. I’m using instance A and subscribed to a community on instance B. Posts in there receive votes from instance C but because I’ve defederated from C (for vote manipulation, perhaps), none of the votes from C have any effect on me. They would have an effect on B and that’s good - it’s up to them.
Also sensible. What do you think of sending it only to the group actor instead of the author?
Ah that is interesting, I missed that the first time.
So the author instance would be responsible for federating activities, not the instance hosting the community? That could be very beneficial for spreading load across the network! But maybe it would complicate moderation because the author could ignore moderator’s commands to delete the post and stop federating it.
Only regarding to votes, but yes. So only the author receives votes and then distributes the update activities containing the new vote counts to the group and the author’s followers. I totally see the potential for abuse, I don’t if that potential is to big or if it is negligible… Mastodon seems to think it is fine…
Mastodon is built around individual posters. When you interact with a post, you interact with the author. Lemmy is built around “communities” (discussions forums) and individual threads/topics. Having multiple different servers handle the voting for a single thread makes much less sense.
The obvious problem is that the author/their instance has a vested interest in up/down votes.
To me votes are a way to signal to others if they should bother reading something. I’m not quite sure how that works on Mastodon. I don’t think likes influence visibility outside the home instance?
The author is interested in getting their message out. Think about someone trying to sell stuff, for example. They would want to manipulate the visibility/apparent popularity of a post. Such a party would also be most interested in the identities of supporters/detractors.
If you wanted to create psychological profiles, you could create bait messages and observe the reactions. That would be much more effort, but if that is a concern, then that probably isn’t good enough.
The obvious problem is that the author/their instance has a vested interest in up/down votes. […] The author is interested in getting their message out. Think about someone trying to sell stuff, for example. They would want to manipulate the visibility/apparent popularity of a post. Such a party would also be most interested in the identities of supporters/detractors.
That is the same on every social media platform, including Mastodon
I don’t think likes influence visibility outside the home instance?
Likes don’t affect that at all, boosts or shares or retweets or whatever they are called affect that and are sent to the author and your followers
If you wanted to create psychological profiles, you could create bait messages and observe the reactions. That would be much more effort, but if that is a concern, then that probably isn’t good enough.
At the moment this is very easily achievable in the threadiverse. You just sub to a community and you get everything you need from that community. With my proposal this would be much harder to achieve, as you’d only get the information from people interacting with you, or, if we’d shift it to the community actor, you’d have to control the instance of the community. Sure still possible (it always will be) but a lot harder
@bentigorlich@gehirneimer.de I think with public groups this is less of a concern. They’re public after all, votes included
In NodeBB votes (of the up variety) are de facto public, only downvotes are hidden.
Hi, Can you please reply to me via email? My real full name has been displayed via your mod log on Lemmy.world. I am respectfully requesting you to either remove or block this post from the public views.
Log into your account and change your display name in the settings.
Hello,
Unfortunately, I cannot change the display name of account as it won’t let me log into piefed.social. It says, “Account registrations are currently closed.” Can you remove contents from the mod log on Lemmy.world? If it is an instance you can access and moderate, let me know. Reply back to me here or send a private message once you have removed my full name or the entire post from the mods log of Lemmy.world.
Thank you.
Nora P.
rimu didn’t read your post correctly, changing your display name to match your real name is not necessary or advisable, likewise signing public comments (you can edit them by clicking on the pen button).
Since the offending comment is made from a user on the anarchist.nexus server I have asked one of the admins there (unruffled) on your behalf, I hope that was ok. I think they can “purge” the comment, meaning they can delete it in such a way that every other server it got sent to receives a notification to delete it as well.
Hi,
Thank you for contacting one of their admins on my behalf. I honestly hope they can either remove my full name or the entire post. But unfortunately my name still turns up on the link I provided @rimu@piefed.social with. Of course I would like anarchist.nexus to come back to once they have already deleted this name and if is disappeared from Lemmy.world and other servers. Can you also inform @db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com. He was able to delete this copy from their instance only and I think he might be able to help as he is likely to moderate the website of anarchist.nexus too. @unruffled@anarchist.nexus can also contact me if this comment has been purged.
I am so sorry. Why should I change the display name on my account?
I am respectfully requesting you to remove my real full name or this whole post from the mod log via Lemmy.world due to privacy reason.
https://lemmy.world/modlog?page=1&actionType=ModRemoveComment&userId=17250114
Can you access this server?
Thank you.
Nora P.
Hi @rimu@piefed.social I am requesting you to remove my full name or the entire comment from the mod log on Lemmy.world,
https://lemmy.world/modlog?page=1&actionType=ModRemoveComment&userId=17250114
Thank you.
Nora P.
Na, having votes in the public means you can spot bad actors over different communities.
Remember when Reddit removed the individual post counts and only gave the % to make manipulation easier, or YouTube removing the thumbs down count so you don’t know if a video is good or bad anymore?
Hiding information makes making an informed decision harder.
Absolutely disagree
Social media is inherently public. Everything here should always be completely public. Nobody should ever think anything they do here is private at all.My private social media is Signal. All my real world friends use it for our personal communications.
So my proposal would be: votes are only sent to the author of a post. The author then sends an Update activity to their followers and the magazine the post belongs to. […] These properties then contain a Collection with a property called totalItems and not a list of the people who actually voted
What’s to prevent the author from faking upvotes, if the votes themselves aren’t public?
If you have malicious software, then nothing. Nothing prevents malicious software to invent users who create like activities either… So in my opinion nothing changes about that
Except that “fake” voting patterns become impossible to spot.
The way they are now, you can look at how an account votes, when it was created, as well as their posts and comments, to determine whether an account is a legitimate user.
Creating fake accounts that look like legit users is a lot of work. Creating just one, then setting a number a really high, is much, much easier.
That’s more effort to do and easier to detect.
Stop thinking in terms of “votes”. Think of the activities as a “fixed content messages”: John liked this. Alice liked that. Bethany did not like that other thing. Each “vote” is a meaningful interaction. A server that says “2734 people did not like your message” means absolutely nothing.
This is not a political council nor a popularity contest. No one will make critical decisions based on the amount of worthless Internet points.
I do not understand arguments about privacy when we are talking about a public, social network. Social interactions online do not need to be that different from real-world interactions. if you are not willing to say “I did not like / I disagree with you” to someone personally, then you shouldn’t say it at all.
My problem is not saying it to the person itself, my problem is that you can build a rekatively detailed personality profile based on the things someone likes. My proposal was that everything goes to the author and the author alone
Ok.I see. Personally I don’t think it’s a good idea. It’s only a marginal benefit in terms of protection against data scrapers (you can also build that profile based on who they follow, or what they write about…) and it makes things more difficult for moderators and hides important information from other community members.
I preferred kbin’s completely open display of votes for each post/comment within the software and not even needing to do a third party site check. I will take a few people completely misreading intent over obscuring it so that it is far easier to do real vote manipulation.
Voting should not be secret.
It seems that the assumption is that there are not and will never be spambots on the Fediverse.
At least, the source of truth shouldn’t be the author of the post.
> @bentigorlich@gehirneimer.de said in A more private way to distribute votes: > > So my proposal would be: votes are only sent to the author of a post. The author then sends an Update activity to their followers and the magazine the post belongs to.
My concern is that this goes against the implicit assumption that the group actor (the community/magazine/category) is the source of truth.
The group actor is the clearinghouse of data in 1b12 style federation, and it would be a departure to change votes to only be sent to the target.
Fwiw when someone upvotes on NodeBB, it gets blasted everywhere too!
I would recommend that votes continue to be sent to group actors, who then decide whether to announce it (old behaviour) or keep quiet and wait for the update before announcing (new behaviour).
It would mean vote synchronization would be less reliable however.
Also this goes directly against @rimu@piefed.social’s vote batching proposal.
My concern is that this goes against the implicit assumption that the group actor (the community/magazine/category) is the source of truth.
The group actor is the clearinghouse of data in 1b12 style federation, and it would be a departure to change votes to only be sent to the target.
That is true. It could of course be changed to send it to only the group instead of the author 🤔
Also this goes directly against @rimu@piefed.social 's vote batching proposal.
Can you link me to it. Seems that I missed that
