Amju Wolf

Also, this isn’t even compatible with copyright law in some countries. I.e here you can’t give up authorship at all; you can only grant an irrevocable, perpetual license (that might even prohibit you from distribution yourself and such) but you’ll always be able to say “I made this” no matter what their license says.

Mass vote manipulation should still be easy to spot. It’ll only be hard to check whether the account voting is a real person.

Thanks for being so upfront about how you run your instance. I think it’s disingenuous when people claim that there is “no agenda” or “no moderation” or whatever, because there is always some - even if unintended - just by the pure nature of people running it. So being explicit and opinionated about it is great.

On one end, if it’s my instance and I want to ban a user, I want the whole fucking user banned – not just remove their ability to vote anonymously.

I mean, is that truly the case? If a user only engages in vote manipulation, but otherwise they have insightful comments/posts, is it really that big of a deal that you will ban only their option to vote?

When you comment you make a conscious decision to put your opinion out there and sign it with your “name” (or alternatively you switch to a “burner” account and do it pseudonymously).

But when you vote for stuff it’s often without much thinking, and it’s private on pretty much every other platform. Where it isn’t it’s usually blatantly obvious that that is the case.

What difference does it make that votes can be viewed, other than for transparency during discussion?

There are many reasons that have been stated time and time again; one is simply that people may wish to stay anonymous when supporting certain opinions.

To me it feels like comments are what you can actually stand behind publicly, while votes also show what you think privately. And not everyone is willing to stand behind all of their opinions publicly, often for fear of backlash or harassment.

This doesn’t solve it. I can still just make multiple accounts and vote multiple times.

I mean yeah, but you could already do that now. The point is to not make it worse, and to not allow malicious instances to vote as if they were other people.

I guess that’s true. Then you could just ask the instance admins to check their users’ voting patterns / deanonymize them / whatever, and if they don’t comply defederate them.

introduces no new spam/brigade vulns which don’t already exist from a rogue instance

It does though. Now a rogue instance would have to have “believable” profiles for the accounts that vote, because an instance of just “lurkers” who seem to suspiciously vote is a pretty big signal of vote manipulation. If you only see a random identifier (or not even that, just a tally of votes) it’d be impossible to tell if it’s truly the instance’s users just passionate about something or actual vote manipulation.

In other words it would at least make the problem way worse.

Sometimes you might want to show support for something but do so privately, without others knowing it’s you in particular supporting that.

Votes could be publicly federated but tied to some uuid instead of the username. That way you still have the same anti spam ability (can see that a user upvoted these things from this instance at this time) but can’t tie it directly to comments or actual user accounts without some extra osint.

The issue with that is with malicious instances that could engage with vote manipulation by just generating new IDs and voting for whatever they want. If you can’t look back at the profile and determine whether it’s a real, non-spam account, it’s a pretty big issue unfortunately.

You also have an issue where someone could potentially vote with “your” ID without any way to detect that it’s not actually “you” who sent the vote.

Comparing to democracy doesn’t make sense, as democracy has mechanisms to ensure 1 person = 1 vote. The internet has no such mechanism. If we did, I’d be all for private voting.

I know, it’s an issue, but there are certainly ways to solve it, like having the vote identity split between multiple servers that can still confirm with each other that the vote is valid, but neither would reveal the actual identity to make it traceable back.

Sounds like those people doing the ostracizing should get moderated if they can’t handle being downvoted.

That’s unfortunately not how it often works. Small, ostracized and vulnerable groups often get taken advantage of. As an example, imagine I want to make a good faight argument around, say, a political topic like Russia. Or a sensitive topic like paedophilia. Or about abortion or trans rights in a religious subreddit. Chances are I’d get downvoted to oblivion, even if the consensus (at least originally on Reddit) was that downvotes should not be used to simply disagree with someone. But at least I “opt into” that, by putting myself out there, knowing that the comment will be attached to my name.

But that’s not really the standard with votes, and them being public has a chilling effect, makes it easy to harass people just for (dis)agreeing with something, etc. We should find a way to make votes more private, not less.

Besides, if a dickhead wants to see the votes today, they can find them - votes are public, Lemmy just doesn’t display them in the UI.

Yes, the votes are already kinda public, but there’s still at least some barrier to it, and most people either don’t know or care enough.

It leads to an even bigger echo chamber, people with unpopular opinions will get ostracized not just for their comments, but even for their voting. There’s a reason why any real democracy has secret votes.

For all the hate PHP gets (or used to get) it’s ecosystem is amazing. And so is the language and standard library itself for the most part. It still inherits some of the original issues, but a lot of work has been done to minimize them.

It’s funny because despite all the fearmongering about Microsoft’s Github acquisition it feels like it only improved since then, while Gitlab has done a shitton of questionable and shitty decisions, a ton of critical security issues and in general feels like (at best) they don’t know what they are doing.

The only thing Gitlab has going for itself is that it’s self-hostable, but they still retain a large amount of control.

It generates code and then you can use a call to some runtime execution API to run that code, completely separate from the neural network.

“Removed by Reddit” implies admin action though.

…or maybe they just don’t want a busy looking logo.

On the contrary, it’s the only comparison you can make, since they are literally the only options.

…and there is no way to do that, currently.

That’s not something that’d likely scale enough to bring any meaningful sum of money.

Even then it targets a tiny, tiny minority of their even current userbase, let alone if they want to approach more “average” users.