I read on reddit that on Lemmy you can see users’ upvote/downvote history. I therefore expected to be able to see upvote/downvote breakdown by user for my own comments. But couldn’t find this. Does this feature exist or is that a myth?

  • Hazzard@lemm.eeEnglish
    131·
    1 year ago

    Hmmm, tbh, I don’t think that’s a feature I’d want. Every now and again you see “that guy” furious that he’s getting downvotes, doubling down and trying to start an argument or something. I don’t need that guy showing up in my DMs.

      • Hazzard@lemm.eeEnglish
        121·
        1 year ago

        Oooh, good point. As an admin/moderator feature, that’s a much better idea.

    • CoffeeAddict@kbin.social
      173·
      1 year ago

      It actually already is a feature. Kbin puts it upfront, and I think lemmy also has a way to access it.

      I think it remains to be seen whether or not it’s a good idea.

      I’ve seen some people say they like the idea because it make people think twice about downvoting - it cuts back on the instinctive “I don’t like this so I am gonna downvote.”

      But, as you said, do we really want people coming after you because you downvoted them? There are crazy ass people out there, and if you ever get doxxed it could be a problem.

      Maybe that last point is hyperbole, but crazy people are gonna do crazy things.

      • Anafroj@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        8·
        1 year ago

        “karma” (as reddit calls scoring) never was more true to its name. :)

        I haven’t looked at Lemmy’s implementation of upvotes/downvotes, but they should be ActivityPub activities, so it means they should appear by making a request to the user’s actor.

        EDIT: I’ve just checked random users outbox (that’s the ActivityPub name for the list of activities), included mine, they are actually just empty. So that probably means that Lemmy is only publishing the upvotes/downvotes when pushing activities to federated servers, which would make those activities way more private, although not completely : someone could setup their own instance to learn about them, and it’s best to be assume that at some point, someone will start such instance and publish an app revealing all votes for everybody (plus, as others mentioned, Kbin is already doing it).

        • CoffeeAddict@kbin.social
          2·
          1 year ago

          Right.

          My intuition says this has to do with kbin wanting to interface with mastodon, but I cant be sure.

          I do wonder how this will impact the Fediverse as it grows. I would not be surprised if the feature creates schisms in the future.

    • LastSprinkles@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      6·
      1 year ago

      Yeah agree I am not sure that’s a feature I’d want either tbh if it wasn’t already there. But seems like it is in some form.

      • Hazzard@lemm.eeEnglish
        5·
        1 year ago

        Yeah, having it on your user page is much less dangerous, imo. Still a possibility of getting called out if you downvote someone you’re arguing with, but you’re already in the comments there.

        The only way I see a problem is if someone writes a bot or extension that reads the user profile into something “per comment”, and if that gets enough traction and use to build up a strong database. However, in that case, I’d imagine the Lemmy devs would build a feature to let instance admins hide that information from regular users.

        • HamSwagwich@showeq.comEnglish
          46·
          1 year ago

          It’s part of the ActivityPub protocol. It’s inherent in the system unless you don’t want votes to register on anything but the local server.

          Don’t vote if you aren’t willing to own your interactions. Stop being a troll.

          • Hazzard@lemm.eeEnglish
            63·
            1 year ago

            It’s not being a troll, downvotes are part of the system for a reason: suppressing toxicity. If you downvote a toxic comment to push it down in the algorithm, there shouldn’t be a risk of that toxic person deciding they have a grudge and attacking you personally. Otherwise you risk downvotes not being used for their intended purpose, and an overall more toxic environment.

            • HamSwagwich@showeq.comEnglish
              46·
              1 year ago

              It absolutely is being a troll. If you aren’t willing to associate yourself with your participation, that’s the definition of a troll.

              With anonymous downvotes, they are already weaponized and used to suppress topics. Having publicly available voting means you can block people who are toxic downvoters and/or hopefully ban those people/bots that do that.

              Let me say this again so I can be perfectly clear: **If you are not willing to own your participation on a public forum, you should not be participating on that public forum. Go to a private one. **

              The rise of online toxicity is a direct correlation with anonymity. What’s even more egregious about your stance is the fact that if you want to be anonymous and maintain your anonimity, it’s easy to do: use a throwaway account or otherwise anonymous account on yours or any other lemmy instance. There is absolutely NO valid reason to not have your voting history public in the Fediverse. The privacy crowd can make that happen by having throwaway accounts (which can be banned for being toxic, etc…) and people who want to have civilized discussions can have that by blocking/banning problem accounts. Taking away the public nature of your participation ONLY encourages toxic behavior and the ONLY people advocating for private voting are either trolls or people who don’t understand the problem.

              • Hazzard@lemm.eeEnglish
                23·
                1 year ago

                I’m not sure I understand your position here, because voting is such a minor part of the system. A troll that only trolls by upvoting and downvoting isn’t much of a threat, unless they’ve got a dozen alt accounts or a botnet, both of which are different situations that should be handled differently. “The definition of a troll” is ridiculous hyperbole.

                And as far as bans are concerned, that’s a moderation problem, not your role as an individual. I’ve never suggested votes should be completely untraceable, that’d be patently ridiculous and remove the ability to actually handle vote manipulation. Moderators and admins should obviously have that access, as I’ve asserted in this thread.

                I’m also not advocating my votes be anonymous, I’m fine with having them public on my page. That alone gives you the complete ability to make a judgement about me as a person, or whatever it is you want to do with that. What I’m suggesting is that a user who’s just been downvoted shouldn’t have a trivial way of linking it to the individual who downvoted them in order to harass them.

                Frankly, the impression I’m getting is that you’re not actually paying much attention to the case I’ve made, and are instead just using my comments as a platform to have a completely different argument that you’re passionate about. That’s the ONLY way that you could have missed my point so entirely, and come to the conclusion that I could ONLY be a troll or a moron.

                • HamSwagwich@showeq.comEnglish
                  54·
                  1 year ago

                  When you interact online and refuse to own your interactions, that’s trolling. That’s what I mean when I say that. If you aren’t willing to own up to your interactions (particularly negative ones), then you are being a troll. Small, large, medium sized doesn’t matter… a troll is a troll and contributes, however minorly, to the toxicity of a given community.

                  And as far as bans are concerned, that’s a moderation problem, not your role as an individual. I’ve never suggested votes should be completely untraceable, that’d be patently ridiculous and remove the ability to actually handle vote manipulation. Moderators and admins should obviously have that access, as I’ve asserted in this thread.

                  As an admin of an instance, that just adds more work that should be handled between users, not moderators/admins. Traditionally yes it’s been handled by moderators/admins, and they get overloaded and become jaded. They can be biased (for or against you), they can just not care, etc… if we can move that moderation job off of the moderators and onto the users where they belong, we foster the independence and autonomy, as well as the accountability, that every individual should have. That way, if something isn’t going your way you know where to look for the source of the problem, instead of blaming biased moderators etc…

                  I’m also not advocating my votes be anonymous, I’m fine with having them public on my page. That alone gives you the complete ability to make a judgement about me as a person, or whatever it is you want to do with that. What I’m suggesting is that a user who’s just been downvoted shouldn’t have a trivial way of linking it to the individual who downvoted them in order to harass them.

                  Why not? If the down voter is a bad actor, why not give the user the ability to know who it is and block them? If the down voter is a white hat and legitimately voting down a subject, why do they need to hide behind anonymity? Anonymous downvotes only serves the bad actors. If you are not a bad actor and you want to participate in a community, you should be held accountable for your actions. This is not a “if you have nothing to hide scenario…” Let me provide an example:

                  Poster A posts something controversial that is completely against the norms of society, lets say they post that “groping women on the train should be allowed”

                  Poster B downvotes them because it’s obviously a stupid idea and deserves a downvote. No problem, right? It’s downvoted because it should be downvoted and if poster A wants to go after poster B (and everyone else who downvoted), as you said, one down voter isn’t going to be a problem.

                  Now, what if Poster A posts “Every human deserves the same basic rights, including trans people!” and poster B decides to downvote Poster A. Should Poster A not be able to identify who downvoted them and avoid them in the future?

                  If voting is “such a minor part of the system” what does it matter if it’s public or not or if someone “goes after” someone who downvoted them? The worst they can do is … down vote them harder?

                  If, however, it’s not such a minor part and is an important part, then we need accountability for who’s voting.

                  If it’s a vote brigade situation or downvote bot, the user being downvoted as the right to know WHO is doing it and block them if they so choose. Taking it to the logical extreme, if a given individual blocks everyone who downvotes them, they will eventually end up in an echo chamber of their own making and isolate themselves, either through blocking people or people blocking them. So it becomes a non-issue on it’s own.

                  Frankly, the impression I’m getting is that you’re not actually paying much attention to the case I’ve made, and are instead just using my comments as a platform to have a completely different argument that you’re passionate about. That’s the ONLY way that you could have missed my point so entirely, and come to the conclusion that I could ONLY be a troll or a moron.

                  What case have you made for private voting? I haven’t seen you make a case, other than “Voting should not be accessible to the general public” but you haven’t explained or demonstrated a scenario where the benefits of that (which are… what?) outweigh the negatives (trolling, brigading, bots, morons, etc)

    • HamSwagwich@showeq.comEnglish
      310·
      1 year ago

      If you aren’t willing to own your interactions with people, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it? Why do you feel the need to hide? Thought processes like this are what leads to toxicity online. If you aren’t willing to own your comments and votes, you shouldn’t be allowed to interact with people in a community.

      We call people that want to be negative online while remaining anonymous a troll. Don’t be a troll.

  • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldEnglish
    562·
    1 year ago

    Oh, I know who upvotes me. It’s the awesome people.

    And the people who downvote me are the people that suck.

    • Reborn2966@feddit.itEnglish
      15·
      1 year ago

      i don’t think it’s in the api. is in the DB, but not exposed anywhere. one instance admin could do query and see them.

      • czech@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        What are downvotes seen by kbin users on lemmy content? It could just be the kbin instance’s local downvotes of the federated content but I never noticed a lack of down votes on lemmy-hosted content when I was running a personal kbin instance.

        • r00ty@kbin.life
          1·
          1 year ago

          kbin doesn’t federate (in or out) downvotes. To the best of my knowledge lemmy doesn’t either. But, I’m not 100% on that.

            • r00ty@kbin.life
              1·
              1 year ago

              Well an upvote and downvote are counted entirely separate on kbin. There isn’t a deduction. So, you’ll just see the upvote count for federated content and only see the downvotes from local users.

                • r00ty@kbin.life
                  3·
                  1 year ago

                  Pretty sure. I did some work on the favourites code (normal upvotes) recently and saw downvotes were stored separate (as vote) with no handler. Also someone else made a pull request to handle downvotes. Not implemented as of now.

                  Also the serious lack of downvotes on my instance.

    • LastSprinkles@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      81·
      1 year ago

      Ahhh right so the information is there publicly available just not in the existing clients. Interesting.

    • DoomBot5@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      Is that info federated or just the count? Might still be trivial to get the info if it’s the former.

      • r00ty@kbin.life
        2·
        1 year ago

        Also without identifying the user it becomes hard to know what’s a unique like and what is a duplicate. I suppose a workaround would be for the user’s instance to keep a record of who liked what, and then just issue just the unique like IDs (which can be traced back to the user only on their home instance).

        It would need to be a bit smart. Say the same user toggles their upvote on and off. The upvote for a given topic I think would need to be a hash of the topic/comment ID + user ID so that the same ID would be re-issued to prevent the upvotes/cancels falling out of sync.

        It’s a lot of effort really for keeping something such as a like private.

        • HamSwagwich@showeq.comEnglish
          2·
          1 year ago

          What if the post is edited at a later time? Then all those votes become invalid. It’s not practical with the way ActivityPub is designed. Honestly, it’s designed the way it is for a reason… if you aren’t willing to own your participation on a public forum, you shouldn’t be on a public forum.

          • r00ty@kbin.life
            1·
            1 year ago

            Why would editing do that? I was talking about using the ids which wouldn’t change on an edit.

            In any case, I don’t have a problem with this info being federated. Some people do, so it’s worth talking about ways it could be done.

              • r00ty@kbin.life
                1·
                1 year ago

                I was suggesting (I actually clearly said it in both comments) hashing the post/comment ID + userid NOT the content. Just enough info to get a unique ID. We don’t need it not to be non-reversible. Just a unique ID for the like.

      • HamSwagwich@showeq.comEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        It would also open the door for rogue instances to send out massive downvote counts without any data to back that up. That’s not to say you couldn’t already do that with fake users, but it’s much easier to identify a mass of fake users than it is to identify a mass of fake downvotes as a number.

  • Limitless_screaming@kbin.social
    123·
    1 year ago

    Open any post on KBin. Click the url, and add /votes/down. those are the people who downvoted that post.

    If the post is from Lemmy you can view “favourites” and “reduces” instead, just add /favourites or /reduces to the end of the url.

    Enjoy :)

  • [email protected]@kerala.partyEnglish
    3·
    1 year ago

    If votes are federated somebody could theoretically make a fork of Lemmy that will show who voted, but that instance has to federate with all other instances

        • r00ty@kbin.life
          31·
          1 year ago

          You will only see them on the instance it happens too. If I downvote on my own instance it will only ever be seen as a downvote here. kbin doesn’t federate the downvotes in either direction. I’m happy to be corrected, but I don’t think lemmy does either.

        • r00ty@kbin.life
          1·
          1 year ago

          I think what changed early on was that there wasn’t upvotes, only boost. When upvotes were added they went in as favourites.

          I changed some code relating to a race condition with multiple consumer processes when a comment is like/unlike cycled and the messages come in together. I couldn’t find any code for that. Also there is a PR for adding this suggesting it didn’t exist before too.

          Also the fact I don’t see downvotes on my own instance is another sign.