Thanks. My initial gut instinct was that the best would be to enable it for everyone, but after reading other’s perspectives and thinking more deeply about the privacy implications, I agree that transparency is the way to go.

Tell me if I’m wrong – since votes are federated, anyone who’s tech-savvy / motivated enough can always expose the identity of who upvoted or downvoted things anyway. No?

I think that the easiest way is to create an instance and collect votes.

But, as far as I can tell, It is not possible to retrieve the votes that were cast before the instance was created. The votes only get sent out to the subscribed instances at the time of voting. If you pull a comment or post later, it will arrive with 0 votes.

Maybe publicizing voting and making sure people know voting is public would be better (esp if it’s already exposed to all end-users through Friendica). I could see a few different ways it could lead to problems if people assume it’s private information when it’s really not.

I think so too. I have already been part of a few conversations with users who have just discovered that this is possible. I think that this transparency is something that the feature wants to achieve, but it is important to publicize it to avoid surprises.

I can include this information in the instance’s application, then at least new users would be informed.

I like the suggestion of mozz@mbin.grits.dev of simply making a bigger effort of letting users know that votes are “semi-public” information in the fediverse, and I have opened an issue to suggest implementing that approach (https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/2316)

But above all I appreciate that you are being transparent about it and taking our opinions into account.

One of the big selling points of Lemmy is privacy, and so many users do have a high expectation of privacy. It is important to be very clear and transparent about aspects that can raise privacy-related flags. Votes need to be public for the federation to work and to prevent double-counting, at least the way they are currently implemented, so transparency is the best solution.

The argument for letting everyone see the votes is a bit more tricky. On the one hand, if the tech-savvy can do it, then why not just let everyone do it? On the other hand, if it is easy to do, you make it easier for users to witch hunt and attack each other on the basis of how they vote.

Putting some additional thought on it… Enabling it for everyone has other privacy implications. For example, old votes would also become public and I can’t get backwards-consent from everyone. Votes from selective instances federating with us will too. I would need to wipe all of the votes from the instance before enabling that. I think making the effort to be transparent is a better approach.

I like the idea of downvotes, and no nobody on this instance is really abusing them

That is true! I have been lucky and there has not been much trouble. Only very nice people seem to like creating accounts here 😜

Thanks for your input

Thank you for your input, it’s very appreciated!

As for keeping down votes, I’d be reluctant to mess with a system that works as well as it seems to.

There is a toggle in the admin settings to enable/disable downvotes, and several instances do disable them.

This hides the button and the results from the UI - other instances can still vote, but it’s not displayed. This change would be easy to implement and revert messing up anything. Personally, I do think that having up/down votes is a useful metric more often than it is abused. Disabling down-votes might be a good match for an instance dedicated to, for example, sharing one’s own art, as users might feel more comfortable sharing in such a space.