A few days ago I downvoted someone’s comment, and the next day I happened to notice every single comment I’ve ever made had at least one downvote. All from the person I dared to downvote the ONE time. I straight up asked why they did it, and they seem to think I’m an “obvious” troll account that “apparently just exist to downvote other people”. I assure you I’m no troll account, and ironically don’t really downvote all that often.
I know the topic of public downvotes has been discussed before, but I never used to care either way. Now I’m kinda leaning in the “I don’t like it” side. Honestly, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel a little offended, maybe even attacked. Also, there goes all my imaginary internet points. Lol
Has anyone else had something like this happen to them, or am I just unlucky?
While that’s definitely a notable downside, I think the upsides outweigh it.
For one, being able to see upvotes & downvotes seems to have made a lot of people a bit more thoughtful with handing them out. This obviously isn’t the case for everyone — there’s still a good bit of downvoting people for disagreeing with the hivemind — but I and others have observed that downvote quality is a lot better here on kbin.social, and I think that vote visibility is a big part of that.
It’s also just transparency on kbin.social’s part. If votes federate, anyone can set up an instance to view your votes or just go to one that shows them. Someone could literally make a website listing downvotes throughout the fediverse, and there’s nothing stopping them. Kbin.social is being transparent about the fact that votes on the fediverse can be accessed by the public, and I have no issue with that.
EDITː Removed a stray asterisk
Kbin.social is being transparent about the fact that votes* on the fediverse can be accessed by the public
This is important. The kind of petty, persevering trolls that @billothekid2 is worried about are exactly the kind of people who’d be likely to look up who downvoted them.
Kbin just makes it clear to us that this info is out there. Anonymous voting isn’t possible in federated social media.
Also, even if they wanted to I don’t think voting could be made anonymous at this point, either. I’m not a programmer in any sense, but I imagine it would totally break federation. Total anonymity would probably need to be a feature from the start.
Kbin at least puts it out there so you know it’s not totally anonymous. Sometimes I wonder how many lemmy users are unaware of this because the software doesn’t make it apparent.
Actually, our downvotes don’t federate out, and we don’t get incoming downvotes either, so you could totally make them private within an instance since that information doesn’t leave the instance anyway.
Not advocating one way or the other, just pointing out that it technically could be an option.
Hmm… I’m no expert, and probably not even competent at these sort of matters, but the thing that popped to my mind was “something something encryption something something trust”. I wonder if this has a smart solution.
I think it would be possible. The software would just have to record a downvote, saying “we checked out this account and registered one downvote, and everything was valid”. The downvote is only reversible on the original instance the logged in user is on, anyway, and that’s between the user and server. The identity doesn’t have to be displayed to others on the original instance or federated.
Someone could literally make a website listing downvotes throughout the fediverse, and there’s nothing stopping them.
This is why I agree that it should be shown upfront. A lot of people won’t like it, but I think users should be somewhat aware that it’s all technically visible.
Someone is gonna make an instance that does exactly this at some point. It will be inevitable as the fediverse matures.
Didn’t you just see the upside too, though? You can see who’s downvoting all your comments and call them out on it. Someone could downvote stalk you on Reddit (quite sure that has happened to me before) and it would be invisible and unprovable.
True, but if they hadn’t seen it was me that downvoted them in the first place, they wouldn’t know who to stalk, and I wouldn’t have to call anyone out at all. Really though, I can still see both sides here. I’m just bitter it happened to me. Lol
@billothekid2 I’m with @FaceDeer on this, it’s way better to know you have a Downvote Fairy than to just think no one appreciates your comments.
Back on reddit it happens a lot, but the targets are more likely to feel discouraged or think the person they are replying to is the one downvoting them.
Besides, I had someone doing this to me here on kbin for a couple of days and they are not someone I ever downvoted or had even argued with.
I asked them to stop and they downvoted me one last time and then stopped. I don’t think they’d realized I can see them.
So the cause isn’t that people can see your downvotes, it’s that some people are just dicks.
@FaceDeer the super annoying thing on reddit would be when I was having a polite discussion with someone and a third party came along and silently downvoted everything they said to me.
Then they’d get all annoyed assuming it was me who did it.
A “fun” experience from Reddit that I’m glad is impossible here on kbin is when I’m in an argument with someone and they would insta-downvote every response I made to them, then vociferously deny that they were doing it even when it was basically impossible for it to be otherwise (for example if we were in a days-old thread nobody else was paying attention to and the downvote was happening within a minute or two of me posting - too fast to even have read the comment).
On a related note, I’m pleased that blocking someone doesn’t prevent them from responding to your comments here. The “get the ‘last word’ in and then block me so I couldn’t answer” pattern was even more annoying, since karma was meaningless anyway but the block disrupted the flow of informative debate if other people were following it too. In such situations I’d edit the last comment I’d made to mention what had happened, at least. Hope that shamed a few folks at least a little bit.
@FaceDeer yeah that secret downvoting thing was super passive-aggressive.
What was most annoying about blocks was that bug where you couldn’t reply to anyone downthread of a comment by the person who blocked you, so they could effectively end your other conversations with other people.
Yeah, trolls really care about being “called out”. Trolls can’t stand negative attention, so be sure to tell lots of people who they are and what they did!
Assuming you’re being sarcastic and mean the opposite, this hasn’t been my experience, actually. Just like with @livus, above, I called out a downvote-stalker once who’d been following me around and when I described how I was seeing his downvote pattern he instantly vanished. In my experience the “downvote warriors” are a cowardly bunch, they love being able to throw punches without being seen to throw punches. Once you make it clear to them that everyone can see what they’re doing they crumple under scrutiny.
The trolls you’re talking about are the kind that love to get into an argument with you. That’s quite different.
Okay. Yeah, I was being sarcastic, but now I see we had different kinds of trolls in mind. Thanks for taking the time to explain.
@FaceDeer interesting, wonder if it was the same person!
The other thing that hasn’t bern mentioned yet is vote manipulation is easy to spot on kbin.
When reddit first migrated here I remember someone being called out for having 3 or 4 profiles upvote/downvote all the same things.
Counterpoint: it makes it even more apparent when bigoted alt right trolls like AnotherAttorney post and we can see they’re the ones upvoting and boosting their own terrible posts, and ridicule them til they quit or switch sock puppets
This is an obvious downside. I’ve experienced a similar thing but being a lemmy user I don’t know who I pissed off. Which is for the best. It was a one off. Ignore it and chances are this one will be too.
stop caring about votes like they mean anything.
I don’t. That’s why I called them imaginary internet points. Lol. My point was about the fact that you can see who downvotes you.
@billothekid2 this exchange raises another point. You and @snooggums downvoting each other here seem to be engaging in “downvote-to-disagree” with each other.
I don’t see nearly as much of this on kbin as I do on, say, lemmy.world and I’m sure it’s because of our more transparent voting system.
I’m personally not a fan because I think it’s vaguely hostile and discourages open discussion.
FWIW, I usually downvote if the person is a dick. Often I also disagree with them, but not always. If you are dragging the conversation down (in some way other than having an unpopular opinion) you get a downvote.
Same, generally speaking when I’m writing a comment in order to disagree with someone I want that other person’s comment to be more visible to other readers. That way they can read it, see my response, and realize how wrong the original comment was and how right I am. :) I save my downvotes for comments that are so wrong they’re not worth a response.
I’ll even sometimes downvote a comment, ponder for a moment, and then remove my downvote and write a response instead.
I am downvoting because complaining about downvotes while saying they don’t matter is hypocritical and not a discussion made in good faith. Just wanted to see if they voted in response, showing their hypocrisy.
Fair enough. I tend to think downvotes are warranted when it’s not adding anything to the conversation and/or are somewhat hostile. Not that it’s worth anything at this point, but the downvote was because I literally just explained myself on the very post they were responding to. People are just putting words in my mouth at this point just because they want to disagree, and at some point it’s easier to downvote that to repeat myself.
I don’t think it’s as simple as that. Downvotes do have some kind of meaning — when you give a downvote, you’re doing it for some reason that you want to convey — and people are going to interpret downvotes accordingly. If downvotes didn’t mean anything, then there’d be no point to them existing at all. What exactly a downvote means depends on the person giving it, but it’s ideally (imo) used to express that a post is spam, hateful, or otherwise a bad contribution to the discussion. Obviously, people shouldn’t take downvotes personally, but a post being downvoted does and should mean something.
Thus, what OP mentions in his post is a legitimate concern. Public votes allow people to more easily downvote spam someone who downvoted them, which is unequivocally a bad thing that we’d prefer not to have. However, whether we should make votes private is a matter of whether the downsides outweigh the upsides, and they don’t.