I recently learned that voting on lemmy is not anonymous. Anyone can get information about who has upvoted and downvoted a post or comment.

In combination with your IP, this is a massive privacy (maybe even physical security) risk. Also, people can target you for your votes.

Sadly, this is something where I would prefer Reddit over Lemmy. Big tech scrapes data from both places anyways, at least Reddit is safe.

  • socsa@piefed.socialEnglish
    2·
    4 days ago

    I don’t understand why everyone is so dismissive of this being a problem. Especially considering it is easily mitigated using simple voting agents.

    It’s not just a privacy concern either, I promise you that trolls love being able to see which accounts are engaging with them in order to target certain demographics. Like we know this kind of shit has been used to manipulate elections already, and people here are just like “well I guess that’s just the world now.”

      • socsa@piefed.socialEnglish
        1·
        4 days ago

        Piefed literally already implemented voting agents and it worked fine until forum politics killed it.

        • anamethatisnt@sopuli.xyz
          1·
          4 days ago

          Ah, so what Rimu calls an alt/sockpuppet account that automatically votes on their behalf.
          I haven’t seen the Matrix chat but having a dev look for feedback and then implement changes based on feedback received isn’t “forum politics” in my world.

          Good luck with your fork!
          https://piefed.social/post/956572

          • socsa@piefed.socialEnglish
            1·
            3 days ago

            Yes that thread is quite literally just describing forum politics, based on a very small amount of feedback from a select group of individuals discussing the matter in back channels.

            Simply put, admins were not satisfied just banning the agents for voting and the user for commenting. This is entirely a perception issue and caused no actual problems besides feels. This caused the implementation of trusted instances which was actually a flawed concept. Rather than iteration on the idea, the pressure from other admins caused it to be abandoned unceremoniously with almost zero input from users. I’m not sure how you can interpret this as anything other than forum politics.