Comment on New to Lemmy. I have a couple of questions.
Stovetop@lemmy.world 3 months agoWith #3, someone correct me if I am wrong, but I don’t believe your run-of-the-mill moderator can see upvotes and downvotes. But instance admins can, just by nature of having access to the server data. Federation wouldn’t work if other instances couldn’t communicate upvotes and downvotes across the platform to other instances, so short of finding some way to encrypt all the data, it’s an unavoidable consequence of the standard.
Blaze@sopuli.xyz 3 months ago
Not yet, but it has been implemented in the backend, the front end needs to catch up github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/4386
Stovetop@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Oh yikes, before I clicked the link I thought you were about to tell me that they were working on user data encryption. Not sure I am keen on enabling even more surveillance to be accessed by who knows who. Will definitely have to start worrying more about which communities I even let on my feed, in case I downvote some bigoted shit from someone’s personal community that shows up in All and they start witch-hunting users who took the bait.
Blaze@sopuli.xyz 3 months ago
To be fair, if a mod bans me based on my vote, maybe I’m better off their community
Stovetop@lemmy.world 3 months ago
It’s not so much the banning I’m worried about as the brigading. If someone develops some mod tool that starts tracking downvotes in your community user by user, they could then essentially assign some sort of social credit score to people and harass them out in the wild.
People can be creeps online, too. I’ve seen more than one situation on Reddit before where people end up getting stalked by other users who harass them anywhere they see them. You say the right thing in front of the wrong person on the wrong day and they can just snap, becoming way too obsessive.
If some troglodyte spams hate speech that ends up in my All feed and I downvote them because that stuff deserves to be buried, I don’t want to have to worry about being potentially stalked and singled out by a weirdo who can connect their downvotes to me. Votes suck and internet points are dumb, but the system serves its purpose of providing an anonymous way to direct content and conversations in productive directions. Good stuff is elevated, bad stuff is buried.