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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 29th, 2023

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  • Yes, I too salivate at the idea that I could simply disappear all of the ideas I disagree with, but that is exactly how to turn a community into an echo chamber.

    So I have users A B C D E F who are known to me who have voted on a given post. D and E are idiots I disregard their votes. F literally hates everything I love so I count his votes inversely. A and B are fantastic I count them x10 I tend to agree with C so I count his x2.

    What you are suggesting here is, as I’m understanding it, a way to only get feedback from people you agree with and to never experience a critical discussion of ideas based on their merits.

    Now, I’m not here to suggest that Lemmy is some kind of shining beacon of drama-free intellectualism, where every idea is discussed without bias or agenda, but I DO think it is valuable to hear from people whose lived experiences led them to a different conclusion than the one I’ve reached. Obviously there needs to be a mechanism to remove trolls from the discussion, but I fear a world where we only see content that we agree with, because then we will truly be removed from reality, and that’s not why I’m here.


  • “If you have nothing to hide then you have nothing to fear.”

    Given the strong presence of the privacy community on Lemmy, I have to say that I’m a bit shocked to hear so many in these discussions chiming in to support voting transparency.

    I’m on board with the idea of using ring signatures to validate the legitimacy of a vote and moderating spammers based on metadata.

    Or, for something (potentially) easier to implement, aggregating vote tallies at the instance level (votes visible to your instance admin and mods) and federating the votes anonymously by instance, so you might see something like:

    Up/down votes are the method of community moderation that sets Reddit apart from many other platforms. If the Lemmy community is trying to capture some of that magic, which is good for both highlighting gems AND burying turds, radical transparency isn’t the path to get there.

    In fact, I’d argue that the secret ballot has already been thoroughly discussed and tested throughout history and there are plenty of legitimate examples of why it would be better if they were more secret than they are today.

    Many people have brought up the idea of brigading, but would this truly get better if votes are public? Is it hard to imagine noticing that an account you generally trust has voted and matching their vote, even subconsciously?

    For those who feel that they aren’t able to post on Lemmy because downvotes make you feel sad, my feeling is that if you make posts in a community and they consistently get down voted to oblivion, you’re in the wrong place. The people in that community don’t value your contributions, and you should find another place to share them. This is the system working as intended and the mods should be thankful that such a system has been implemented.

    The last point I’ll make is about the potential for a chilling effect - making users less likely to interact with a post in any way due to a fear of retaliation. Look - if you’re looking for a platform where all of your activity is public, those are out there. Why should we make Lemmy look just like every other platform?