Probably better to post in the github issue rather than replying here.
Yes, and there’s no genuine argument otherwise.
If you want Lemmy to grow and not be completely overrun with bots posting propaganda and signal boosting extremism, showing votes is the only way forward. It’s the only mechanism by which independent parties can discover and expose things like “every post and comment by this account is upvoted by these 20 other accounts that have never posted and whose names follow the same formula”.
The privacy you’re mourning never existed in the first place and it can’t exist on any platform. For Lemmy, it’s required for federation. On sites like Reddit, you have privacy from other users, but not from the company or anyone they sell that data to.
Since true privacy isn’t an option, it would be far better to be open about that lack of privacy. This thread is already riddled with people who thought their votes were private, rather than just inconvient to look up. That’s far more dangerous and deceptive.
This needs to happen, regardless of the ill-informed tantrums it may cause. If you want to upvote pornography without it being used against you, create accounts that are strictly for pornography and properly compartmentalize your accounts.
Problem is, it actually encourages a hive mind. I’ve already had 2 people try to bully me.
I’d go one step further. Upvotes down votes and totals should be hidden entirely. This would encourage people to post based on their own without external influence It reduces the incentive to use bots
Problem is, it actually encourages a hive mind. I’ve already had 2 people try to bully me.
Then tell those people to get fucked.
I’d go one step further. Upvotes down votes and totals should be hidden entirely.
Unless you have an actual implementation of how that would work, telling us “what you’d do” is just a fantasy. You can’t “hide” things from federation – they’re either included, removed or made inconvenient to access.
Does “posting without external influence” even have any value besides sounding cool? The entire concept of Lemmy and Reddit is that external influence floats and sinks content. If you want unranked, anonymous content, you want 4chan (which is of course riddled with extremists and good content is almost entirely drowned out with worthless shitposts).
Personally, I’d rather that “external influence” was as fair and open and accountable as possible, rather than “I wonder if 500 of those votes are just Russian bots”.
My implementation would be hide it from the UI by default for instances
Also, never said unranked… I meant simply hide the rankings. Part of the disadvantage of showing the totals on the UI means that high upvotes make it seem like it was highly popular. It also means that people don’t mindlessly upvote posts simply because there were a lot of upvotes. By hiding them, you know its popular, but no how popular. It changes the way people interact so it’s more normal.
Showing Upvotes/downvotes doesn’t show whether they are bots are not. It just means they’ll upvote/downvote more random shit and mess around wit the rest of the posts, so more crap rises to the top because they’re interfering with the rankings.
There are easier ways to identify bots… And, it just aids abusive people. I don’t think it will assist with bots at all… Sorry.
