If you click on the “more” button under a comment or link there will be an activity tab. In this tab you can see everyone who has boosted, favourited or reduced the post. I’m not sure if this a
Is a good feature but it’s interesting to see when someone decides to reduce all of your content for no reason.
I think that regular users don’t really care, why would anyone obsess about tracking down which account liked which post? the only people who get into that sort of thing, are people who likely manipulate with multiple accounts themselves. and they don’t wanna be traceable and that’s why they’re afraid of this feature.
I disagree wholeheartedly.
Having your voting history public also constrains people from participating in the community if the things they support or object to would cause harassment or harm from people who know who they are, which is not always preventable, for example a shared household, using kbin from work (activity monitored), etc…
I could easily see an Amazon worker getting fired because they were logged upvoting pro-union threads. They wouldn’t even need to be doing this from a company network - just accessing kbin once on their network for any reason would have their user name associated with them, and then Amazon can simply monitor their activity on kbin even when they are using it from home.
Look at everything Amazon has done to their workers and tell me that this isn’t a believable scenario. And that’s just one example.
Having votes public can cause real harm to people.
This prompts two thoughts for me.
First - what you’re describing is just the generalised version of having the identity behind your account known. In your example, upvotes and downvotes don’t need to be visible in order for Amazon to see your comments on pro-union threads; and I think comments, rather than votes, are far more likely to be used against an employee in this way.
Second - I think what you’re describing exposes the question of what downvotes actually are, because I don’t think they can always be interpreted as showing support or objection. My understanding is that on Reddit, as a social news aggregator, upvotes and downvotes were originally a mechanism for deciding whether the content of a link was relevant and interesting to the sub, or irrelevant and boring - it was all tied to the algorithm as a way of pushing interesting content up the page. But at some point, as Reddit grew, that morphed into using upvotes and downvotes to agree or disagree with opinions (especially political opinions) being expressed.
I’m okay with ‘upvote to agree’, but I still find this use of the downvote button in the comment section is troubling, and my hope is that Reddit’s ‘downvote to disagree’ culture doesn’t carry over to kbin and Lemmy.
The other day I was having a perfectly civilised discussion with someone on one of the UK communities about one aspect of health policy (whether England should follow Wales and Scotland’s path of extending free prescriptions to people on very high incomes in the name of universality, or whether England was right to focus its health budget on other health priorities like GP availability or surgery waiting lists). The discussion was perfectly polite yet the other person was downvoting each of my responses - they probably didn’t realise I could see this and I didn’t call them out on it. It made me wonder about their thought process though - we were having a good discussion, neither of us was being rude or insulting, and yet each time I took the time to respond to them, they just reflexively downvoted me before responding themselves. That struck me as poor etiquette in a conversation - one of those toxic features of anonymous online interactions that few people would try to replicate in real life.
My hope is that ‘downvote to disagree’ doesn’t take hold here in the way it did on Reddit, and that visible downvotes will encourage a bit more trigger discipline around the downvote button. Downvote when there’s cause - material that’s not relevant to the sub, or that’s low quality / low effort, or people behaving in a way that’s rude or insulting or aggressive or trolling - and be prepared to justify your downvotes if needed. The culture here can better than what Reddit became.
I think it’s more accurate to say that up/downvoting is used as like/dislike, with disagreement being a special case of dislike.
But like it or not, you will never get rid of that association because it’s the simplest and most direct interpretation of an up/down vote. It’s just psychology.
Also keep in mind that your feelings on what up/downvoting should mean is really more appropriate at the comment level, whereas, having them represent like/dislike is notably more appropriate at the thread/post level - as the idea for a sub/magazine is that content users like should be promoted and content they don’t want to see should be demoted.
Unfortunately, that makes it even more difficult because now you would want the arrows to mean different things depending on the area they are used.
The end result is that you will never break the link between voting and people interpreting it as like/dislike. It’s the appropriate interpretation for threads/posts, and it then becomes the simplest interpretation for comments as well.
What you can do is have a separate control to indicate whether a comment is appropriate or not. However, you would still run the risk of people weaponizing it against comments they particularly dislike, so I’m not sure whether it would be worth the effort to implement.
As a regular user who doesnt like social media, this is something that all regular users should be aware of. You can easily get your info taken and processed in a way that becomes consistent with a shadow profile of you made by facebook or other companies in order to track you. There would be no difference in using kbin and using facebook if your info is open to everyone for companies to scrape and parse.
This will likely lead me to stop using kbin and wait for something more private oriented to come up
There’s a very simple way to ensure that your upvote/downvote records aren’t public; simply never upvote or downvote anything. I think it’d be fairly straightforward to add a user option to hide everything related to upvoting and downvoting from a user, giving them a kbin experience completely divested from that sort of thing.
That’s a great way to kill user engagement before it even starts.
They can still comment if they want. Indeed, without vote buttons that now becomes the only way to say “u suk” or “this!”
Normal people wouldn’t. Unfortunately, there are a lot of assholes, stalkers, and people who are salty they got downvoted and want revenge.
Ever seen people on Reddit say “Whoever downvoted this, go fuck yourselves?” I can guarantee that, if they knew who downvoted them, they wouldn’t keep their reaction contained to an edited comment.
This, pretty much. Though I do look at downvotes sometimes because its an easy was to identify trolls and bots, I’d be fine not seeing the option.
That’s a fair point. But there are people who live in situations where such activity has legal/societal implications.
Think some countries that put people to death for blasphemy or people in the states who associate being transgender with being literal child molesters.
Sure keep your account private but that isn’t always feasible even if you try. We see people get doxxed even from innocuous breadcrumbs of statements made over time.
Or don’t favorite/upvote and yet it’s easy to inadvertently do so which can be an issue.
That’s why I’m for a way to handle it, if possible, that minimizes the bad actors. And if not possible then it needs to be really really clear.
Like “upvote” is followed by something that succinctly notes “Favorite saved and ready to share across the fediverse”
It’s also a potential accessibility issue. Fear of being watched or tracked is a symptom of a variety of mental health issues as well as a common consequence of being a victim of abuse or other types of violence. Something I want from a Reddit replacement, and the thing that made Reddit the only acceptable social media for me several years ago, is the ability to maximize anonymity. The server is going store and be able to trace every interaction and I’m okish with that because it’s the trade off for not having to be on 4chan and having some semblance of civilization but the less I can control what information is publicly viewable the less I’m going to be willing to interact with the platform.