YSK: Your Lemmy activities (e.g. downvotes) are far from private

Muddybulldog@mylemmy.win to You Should Know@lemmy.world – 2769 points –
i.imgur.com

Edit: obligatory explanation (thanks mods for squaring me away)...

What you see via the UI isn't "all that exists". Unlike Reddit, where everything is a black box, there are a lot more eyeballs who can see "under the hood". Any instance admin, proper or rogue, gets a ton of information that users won't normally see. The attached example demonstrates that while users will only see upvote/downvote tallies, admins can see who actually performed those actions.

Edit: To clarify, not just YOUR instance admin gets this info. This is ANY instance admin across the Fediverse.

1099

You are viewing a single comment

I disagree, a lot of people troll-downvote meaning they downvote content that they don't like, or just downvote because it's already low score.

Is there a valid reason, according to you, to use the downvote button? I'm really interested in knowing.

The accepted reason for downvoting since early Reddit times is content that either doesn’t contribute to discussion or is factually false. Downvote was never meant to be a disagree button, but I am sure we've all broken that rule occasionally.

Exactly. It seems everyone here is of the impression that voting is for agree/disagree. That sucks and it’s simply impossible to fix.

Downvoting has always been an indicator that you disagree in some way. Whether it’s a disagreement with the substance or format never mattered. You’ll sometimes see people jump through hoops trying to justify how their form of disagreement is the only valid one though.