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.

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[–] oleorun@real.lemmy.fan 174 points 3 months ago (13 children)

I'm an instance owner and mod. I'll describe what we see.

Like anyone else, I can check a post or comment and see the upvote and downvote counts. If I click on a specific menu item by a post or comment I can also see who voted which way.

I check it often and to date have only banned two users, out of thousands, who were consistently downvoting posts. These bot accounts were literally voting within seconds of the post going federated.

It's a useful feature on my end and I think others should be able to see it.

[–] PhobosAnomaly@feddit.uk 23 points 3 months ago (11 children)

Thamk you for the insight, instance administrator views are valuable and unique.

At the risk of sounding like I'm presenting a bad faith argument, why ban them? I don't like the whole "free market" analogy but surely it's one of the liberating features of federated servers, being able to to largely express your votes or content as you see fit within the legal framework of the host nation. Wouldn't the odd one or two mass downvoters/upvoters/theyvoters ultimately be a statistical abberation or is the fediverse still small enough for this sort of shit to carry weight?

Open criticism of my view welcome, as always!

[–] BlueEther@no.lastname.nz 17 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Admin of a small instance, I have banned 2 accounts for another instance that were downvoting almost all content in a threads without any other interaction. They were being disruptive to the flow at the time, much like @ericjmorey@discuss.online describes.

[–] PhobosAnomaly@feddit.uk 5 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Oh man, this is awesome - it's wonderful hearing from the practitioners of the art!

I'm just trying to figure out what driver establishing the tipping point for breaking or the ban hammer - is there any empirical data to drive these decisions, or is the fediverse user base small enough that you act on "feel" or "professional instinct"?

Managing emerging technologies fascinates me so any input - including the germs you've already volunteered - is very much appreciated 👍

[–] BlueEther@no.lastname.nz 8 points 3 months ago

For me and my (very - it may be down to just me logging in, but a couple of the communities have a few people that read/vote) small instance it comes down to feel ("Don't be a dick"). Dave, the admin of lemmy.nz (about 80 users per week) has the same in their side board as their "Rule". Dave and I set up our *nz instances in the same week and we chat often. He might not be quire as quick with the ban hammer as I might be though.

When you are this small even a small outside problem can have huge effects on your instance

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