Interesting difference from Reddit: Upvotes/Downvotes are not anonymous
Hey folks! Just realized something that makes Lemmy different from Reddit. Because of the federation, your votes are not technically anonymous on Lemmy. At least, I think.
Although there’s no UI to look at a user’s voting history yet, one could conceivably be built by an instance. Perhaps coincidentally, I hear there’s instances out there populated by mostly bots?
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They're definitely not anonymous, and Kbin actually does have the UI to show who is upvoting and downvoting any post if you view it on there.
That's only on KBin though and it's a feature design of the KBin software. That's because it's based on Twitter where likes are public. Lemmy doesn't publicly show those actions. Idk how far it goes in terms Kbin tracking guests though.
It's not specific to kbin actually, it's just how the activitypub protocol reports likes/upvotes. I can see votes on lemmy threads made by lemmy users for example because that data needs to be reported as part of the protocol.
I love it. I've already used that feature to block someone who was stalking my posts and downvoting them. Then I got curious and checked out a bunch of posts on the front page that had downvotes but didnt really warrant them. I found there were about 5 accounts who were heavy downvoters for apparently no reason. They also got blocked.
I agree, I think it's useful! I also blocked a person yesterday who was downvote stalking me, they clearly didn't want to see the things I was posting anyway.
Can someone show me how to find this? I can't figure it out.
Also curious if it's possible to see who is subscribed to a magazine or who is following me.
More > activity > reduces for Kbin.
Scroll to the bottom of the thread and find reduces for the thread.
Kbin is influenced by wykop.pl that have a list of wbo downvotes or upvotes. Helps finding bots or mobs. Wykop was originally a Digg clone. It was huge in Poland for some time until it went full right wing populist and community got split into those who stayed and those who migrated to reddit.
Digg got a polish clone. Digg dies. Polish clone is huge. Some people move to Reddit. Polish clone eventually becomes a trash can. Wykop migrants are fed up by reddit, they move to kbin that is a Polish reddit clone but better.
What a circle.
It's an unavoidable feature of federation that up-/downvotes are public. Kbin chooses to make that fact visible, but if it didn't, it would be easy to make a tool to get that information from any fediverse instance. Kbin making that fact visible at least alerts you that your votes are public.