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@subignition

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  • 49 Comments
Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: November 1st, 2023

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  • I have to disagree. It should not be a consequential or self-conscious act if you aren’t using your real identity. (If you are, the expectation that you should be very careful with how you participate remains unchanged. This isn’t LinkedIn and it shouldn’t be trying to be.)

    Commenters on the GitHub issue have put it better than I can:

    An average user absolutely benefits from being able to see who voted on a post or comment and what their vote was. A person noticing that someone is actively down voting their content in a deliberate way empowers the user to have it dealt with. Mods might not [cue in to] that kind of targeted harassment.

    Your vote isn’t private in either case regardless. At most you need to know someone’s birthday, first name, and last name to find someone’s voting record in America (might depend state by state). Someone willing to set up a Lemmy instance to see your votes is also capable of then setting up bots to specifically target you with down votes, which is the more egregious of the two actions.

    People who use the fediverse need to get used to the fact that things are not private here, that’s the point of interoperability, trying to convince them that they have fake privacy is just going to make them feel self entitled and violated when they learn that nothing here is really private, which shouldn’t really be expected as it is a public and decentralized forum.

    I don’t think users are done any favours by pretending they are private as bad actors can already do whatever odious crap they want to and it leads people into a false sense of security. For example someone liking controversial content on an account which can be traced to an identity they may need to keep separate is already taking a massive risk under a false assumption of privacy.


  • I’d be curious to know where that expectation is coming from. On average I’d expect a majority of folks have that expectation carried over from Reddit. Another poster somewhere mentioned that there are several other social media platforms that don’t have private voting, and I wonder if the expectations would be different from people who came from those.

    Personally I think the transparency on votes here has been refreshing and am sad to see platforms pushing to make it private. But then, I grew up in a time before Facebook, when it was understood that you used a pseudonym, not your real identity, and needed to be careful about what you chose to share on the Internet. If you had concerns about being judged for a specific opinion or a hobby or whatever, you could just make a separate account for those topics. Kind of like how some folks only keep a Reddit account around these days for porn.