Lemmy

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A little tag if commenting user has up-voted a topic? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 3 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

13 comments fedilink hide all child comments

This could be some incentive for up-voting relevant topics. Maybe also a tag indicating a commenting user has joined the community they are posting in?

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 3 years ago (1 children)

These kind of gamification methods to drive engagement are dark patterns driven by the need of advertisement companies to capture user attention.

Up and down voting was originally not invented as a feature to drive user-engagement or signal approval, but as a way to crowd-source link curation in an largely non-moderated internet forum. I think it is good to keep that original function in mind and design the features around that. So looking from that perspective it is better to have votes anonymous I think.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 years ago

Up and down voting was originally not invented as a feature to drive user-engagement or signal approval, but as a way to crowd-source link curation in an largely non-moderated internet forum. I think it is good to keep that original function in mind and design the features around that. So looking from that perspective it is better to have votes anonymous I think.

This is my thinking as well. Of course when ranking, there's trade-offs between transparency ( which does promote approval-seeking behavior, because it shows ), mental health, and privacy, so we have to be careful about how much info about votes we expose. It'd pry be fine if we had an upvotes page that was private to you, but I don't think it'd be a good idea to show that to others.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago)

This sounds like a good way of getting a better idea of who you're talking to.

But I dislike the idea of things becoming parochial. For example, "He just joined the community two days ago! What is he talking about?" Or "Keep out of this community. If you're not part of it don't bring your uninformed opinion here!" In my case, I like the idea of pseudonimity being the only thing people know of me. Not even my karma is immediately visible to people. Just my pseudonym.

Similarly, sometimes I want to comment on something without up-voting it. The reason is that up-votes mean different things to me at different moments. Sometimes I up-vote because I like the content and I want to signal that.* Other times, I'm not particularly pumped by something but I think it's important, as in it's important for others to see. And yet other times, I am part of discussions and yet I actually down-vote the post because I think it's not a topic that I'd like others to see (don't worry, I didn't do this with your post! Nor do I with the vast majority of posts). Other times I don't do anything; I comment without touching votes.

But when I do vote, part of why I do it is because I know my vote will be aggregated. I trust that it's kept private.

* Funnily enough, I don't think I've ever encountered a post I straight up dislike. I guess I've found them all interesting or haven't bothered to down-vote? However, comments can sometimes be sour— those I do down-vote when I dislike them, mainly the style, not always the content.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago) (2 children)

I like the Reddit way of doing it where the user has pages which lists what they've upvoted and downvoted, but they can choose not to display it to other users in the settings.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 years ago (2 children)

Is this information actually private in Lemmy? Since it is federated there will need to be some information exposed. If it is aggregated by server there may be some obfuscation but I don't think it is impossible to keep this information completely private.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 years ago (1 children)

@[email protected], are you able to answer this?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 years ago (1 children)

@[email protected] sure, there's no API that exposes your upvotes / downvotes, but I think it'd be fine to expose that for your own user. I'll open an issue.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 years ago (1 children)

I think you misunderstood the comment but it is answered here: https://lemmy.ml/post/69362/comment/61311

Apparently all votes are public. Maybe it would make sense to surface this in the UI then to make it obvious that this is the case.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 years ago (1 children)

Ah, federation sure, but that's a case where we shouldn't expose it outside of trusted instances, and certainly not in the api.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 years ago (1 children)

Can you elaborate for trusted instances? I can't find anything about those and I thought anyone could stand up their own Lemmy and connect to the fediverse. I didn't realize that you had to be approved to follow a community.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 years ago

There is open, allow list, and block list federation.

https://github.com/lemmynet/lemmy/blob/main/config/config.hjson

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 years ago

Remote instances will see all votes (and the users who made them) in communities that they follow.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 years ago

I think that might be a good thing for moderators to see in order to determine if a user is systematically voting in some way that makes it likely that the account is a sockpuppet. But I don't think having that as a publicly available page is very helpful and might very well be counter-productive.