I have been working on Lemvotes, a tool to check who voted on a Lemmy post. In this blog post, I will describe how it works and the ethics of such a tool.
Having access to information about who voted on a post would allow people to locate brigading1 efforts and detect bots spamming down/upvotes on posts. Currently, only admins can access this information, which makes it harder for users to report such behaviour to them.
Or provide the empire controlling most of the bots, extra ammunition to have AI determine a social credit score for everyone. Winner gets a free trip to El Salvador.
IMHO the entire voting thing is useless. If you don’t like a post, don’t read it. If the post is aggressive and very harmful (racist, fascist), inform the admin to remove it. If the post is interesting, read it and mark as done. So, why voting?
In Reddit and even here on Lemmy, I saw critical comments - which I myself sometimes do not like, but did not downvote - that were heavily downvoted by others (though it was just a critical view). What does this mean? That a user has to play according to the rules of the masses? That he/she cannot express his/her different views? If you don’t like or think a comment is weirded, ask why. Engage the person in a discussion (which may be promoted by the lack of a voting system). Perhaps you can convince him/her, or perhaps the other user can show you a different perspective, which may turn out to be a bit extreme, but not that wrong either. Right?
Or provide the empire controlling most of the bots, extra ammunition to have AI determine a social credit score for everyone. Winner gets a free trip to El Salvador.
I find this whole thing weird because some federating platforms (like mbin I think) already show voting users publicly
I think they limit it to upvotes for normal users
IMHO the entire voting thing is useless. If you don’t like a post, don’t read it. If the post is aggressive and very harmful (racist, fascist), inform the admin to remove it. If the post is interesting, read it and mark as done. So, why voting? In Reddit and even here on Lemmy, I saw critical comments - which I myself sometimes do not like, but did not downvote - that were heavily downvoted by others (though it was just a critical view). What does this mean? That a user has to play according to the rules of the masses? That he/she cannot express his/her different views? If you don’t like or think a comment is weirded, ask why. Engage the person in a discussion (which may be promoted by the lack of a voting system). Perhaps you can convince him/her, or perhaps the other user can show you a different perspective, which may turn out to be a bit extreme, but not that wrong either. Right?