Question I'd like to hear everyone's thoughts on possibly making votes public. This has been discussed in a lot of other issues, but here's a dedicated one for discussion. Positives Could help figh...
Probably better to post in the github issue rather than replying here.
How are harassing comments you could receive about your voting choices much different than harassing comments you could receive about the comments you make? Serious question. My instance only shows details on upvotes and not downvotes, but because the information is already public due to the ActivityPub protocol, it’s already possible (albeit taking some effort) for anyone motivated to look at those details.
In both cases, it could reach the level of moderation actions against the offending user, but if vote details are hidden then you also lose the ability as a user to notice when (for example) people or bots are following you around and downvoting all your comments indiscriminately. While moderators and admins can still look into those things currently, I feel like moderation bandwidth is already slightly strained in the Fediverse, and relying on moderator efforts to catch that kind of behavior is going to be less reliable than noticing and flagging it yourself.
It’s different because there might be some people who you always end up downvoting their comments and you don’t even realize it’s the same person because you don’t look at user names and there aren’t really that many prolific commenters here so they will see that you’re always downvoting them and assume malice in a way that they wouldn’t otherwise because they’re not going through your comments, they’re only looking at theirs.
For example, this comment just a few down:
I’m mildly curious if the single down vote I get on ~70% of my comments is from like one guy I pissed off at some point. At the same time I don’t care enough to work around the system, so maybe it works?
They immediately assume that if one person is downvoting them it is malice instead of maybe that one person just disagrees with their comments for other reasons and isn’t even looking at user names.
Edit: I just noticed you did the same thing in your comment too. There are not that many users here, just because someone is consistently downvoting your comments doesn’t mean they are following you around, there isn’t a lot of content and people who spend time here see a lot of it. Maybe they just disagree with every comment you make that they happen to see and have no idea or care who you are.
I think that comment you quoted is actually mine, haha.
Yeah it’s a mild curiosity for me. It’s fairly rare that my posts get more than one downvote, but it is very common for my posts to get exactly one. I’m sure it is just my brain doing its thing and constantly looking for patterns that has me wondering if it’s largely the same person in the first place. You’re probably right that it is not coordinated or malicious, and I don’t really suspect that it is.
I would definitely not be messaging anybody to ask why I’m being downvoted; personally it doesn’t bother me because of course not everyone is going to agree with what I have to say. But I do acknowledge that there is greater potential for that to happen at scale if votes are totally public for everyone.
Edit: And I am not claiming to be perfect myself either. There were certainly a couple users who I have consistently downvoted for what I have seen as bad faith participation. One of those users has mellowed out a lot over time and only rarely gets a downvote from me these days; the other slowly ramped it up until I decided they were worth blocking. I try not to reflexively downvote comments I simply disagree with, but I’m definitely guilty of leaving a downvote in lieu of having the energy to respond with push back to something disingenuous.
They aren’t, however that doesn’t mean that because one exists the other should do the same.
My instance while it has the ability to see scores I keep them turned off, I find the score system as a whole to be counterproductive to a healthy environment as it encourages an echo chamber effect. an effect that by making every vote public to the standard person will just become worse as now the people who were voicing their opinion via the downvote/upvote system, will think twice about voicing in the first place. It also removes the people who are non-combative/confrontational from giving an opinion as it links a name to the score. There’s tons of people that would like to give their opinion about things, but don’t want it to be able to be looked up easily, and don’t want to be confronted about that opinion.
If conversations were healthy and always on topic I would fully agree with a public info voting system, but, there is no system in place to prevent someone from getting super pissed off that you downvoted their comment that’s about how they love the color red when the conversation at hand is to do with the financial stability of McDonald’s so they decide to just Branch out and nuclear downvote every other comment you have, or decide to try to harass you in your other comments. Yes you can block them and you can get the instance team involved but that can only go so far especially if the problamic user is part of a different instance, and like you said moderation is already strained so there’s no point in giving even more work to them
The better solution in my opinion, is just keep the barrier in place, and honestly if it had the ability to I would say restrict down what the API provides regarding scores even further, but I’m fairly certain that the way it is due to the need of being able to Federate.
How are harassing comments you could receive about your voting choices much different than harassing comments you could receive about the comments you make? Serious question. My instance only shows details on upvotes and not downvotes, but because the information is already public due to the ActivityPub protocol, it’s already possible (albeit taking some effort) for anyone motivated to look at those details.
In both cases, it could reach the level of moderation actions against the offending user, but if vote details are hidden then you also lose the ability as a user to notice when (for example) people or bots are following you around and downvoting all your comments indiscriminately. While moderators and admins can still look into those things currently, I feel like moderation bandwidth is already slightly strained in the Fediverse, and relying on moderator efforts to catch that kind of behavior is going to be less reliable than noticing and flagging it yourself.
It’s different because there might be some people who you always end up downvoting their comments and you don’t even realize it’s the same person because you don’t look at user names and there aren’t really that many prolific commenters here so they will see that you’re always downvoting them and assume malice in a way that they wouldn’t otherwise because they’re not going through your comments, they’re only looking at theirs.
For example, this comment just a few down:
They immediately assume that if one person is downvoting them it is malice instead of maybe that one person just disagrees with their comments for other reasons and isn’t even looking at user names.
Edit: I just noticed you did the same thing in your comment too. There are not that many users here, just because someone is consistently downvoting your comments doesn’t mean they are following you around, there isn’t a lot of content and people who spend time here see a lot of it. Maybe they just disagree with every comment you make that they happen to see and have no idea or care who you are.
I think that comment you quoted is actually mine, haha.
Yeah it’s a mild curiosity for me. It’s fairly rare that my posts get more than one downvote, but it is very common for my posts to get exactly one. I’m sure it is just my brain doing its thing and constantly looking for patterns that has me wondering if it’s largely the same person in the first place. You’re probably right that it is not coordinated or malicious, and I don’t really suspect that it is.
I would definitely not be messaging anybody to ask why I’m being downvoted; personally it doesn’t bother me because of course not everyone is going to agree with what I have to say. But I do acknowledge that there is greater potential for that to happen at scale if votes are totally public for everyone.
Edit: And I am not claiming to be perfect myself either. There were certainly a couple users who I have consistently downvoted for what I have seen as bad faith participation. One of those users has mellowed out a lot over time and only rarely gets a downvote from me these days; the other slowly ramped it up until I decided they were worth blocking. I try not to reflexively downvote comments I simply disagree with, but I’m definitely guilty of leaving a downvote in lieu of having the energy to respond with push back to something disingenuous.
They aren’t, however that doesn’t mean that because one exists the other should do the same.
My instance while it has the ability to see scores I keep them turned off, I find the score system as a whole to be counterproductive to a healthy environment as it encourages an echo chamber effect. an effect that by making every vote public to the standard person will just become worse as now the people who were voicing their opinion via the downvote/upvote system, will think twice about voicing in the first place. It also removes the people who are non-combative/confrontational from giving an opinion as it links a name to the score. There’s tons of people that would like to give their opinion about things, but don’t want it to be able to be looked up easily, and don’t want to be confronted about that opinion.
If conversations were healthy and always on topic I would fully agree with a public info voting system, but, there is no system in place to prevent someone from getting super pissed off that you downvoted their comment that’s about how they love the color red when the conversation at hand is to do with the financial stability of McDonald’s so they decide to just Branch out and nuclear downvote every other comment you have, or decide to try to harass you in your other comments. Yes you can block them and you can get the instance team involved but that can only go so far especially if the problamic user is part of a different instance, and like you said moderation is already strained so there’s no point in giving even more work to them
The better solution in my opinion, is just keep the barrier in place, and honestly if it had the ability to I would say restrict down what the API provides regarding scores even further, but I’m fairly certain that the way it is due to the need of being able to Federate.