Currently, almost anyone in the Fediverse can see Lemmys votes. Lemmy admins can see votes, as well as mods. Only regular Lemmy users can’t. Should the Lemmy devs create a way to make the votes anonymous?
There is a discussion going on right now considering “making the Lemmy votes public” but I think that premisse is just wrong. The votes are public already, they’re just hidden from Lemmy users. Anyone from a kbin/mbin/fedia instance can check out the votes if they are so inclined.
The users right now may fall into a false sense of privacy when voting because the votes are hidden from Lemmy users. If you want to vote something and not show up on the vote list, please create another account to support that type of content and don’t tell anyone.
Admins need to know if the votes/likes coming in are legitimate, else they should block them. It’s too easy to abuse anonymous votes to affect how content is ranked.
This is a very real problem right now. Admins that are on to it use the votes to identify swarms of users that follow each other around upvoting each other’s spam/troll posts.
And that is still possible with pseudonymous tokens votes. You just end up banning tokens for malicious voting activity, and users for malicious posting activity. It’s at best a very mild adjustment to moderation workflows.
How does this work? The community issues federates votes but with a linked token instead of a linked user? How do you track vote manipulation across different communities on different instances?
As far as I understand it all activity originates from the home instance, where users are interacting with federated copies of posts. The unique user token from a well behaving instance follows the user across the fediverse, allowing bulk moderation for voting patterns using that token. The only difference is that it is not explicitly tied to a given user string. That means moderation for vote manipulation gets tracked via a user’s vote token, and moderation for trolling/spam/rule violations happens via their display name. It may be possible that a user is banned from voting but not commenting and vice versa. It’s is a fairly minor change in moderation workflow, which brings a significant enhancement to user privacy.
