PSA: every interaction you make with various posts on kbin is viewable to everyone.

zeste@kbin.social to /kbin meta@kbin.social – 156 points –

If you click on the "more" button under a comment or link there will be an activity tab. In this tab you can see everyone who has boosted, favourited or reduced the post. I'm not sure if this a
Is a good feature but it's interesting to see when someone decides to reduce all of your content for no reason.

81

Rel: https://codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core/issues/455

Good discussion, there. I like the idea of allowing it to be set per instance; while it doesn't hide the votes from admins, changing the in-instance presentation of the data does allow an instance to customize the "feel" of the instance... much like Beehaw chooses not to use downvotes at all.

I'm on the fence re displaying them. I use the downvotes activity to search for bots / astroturfers and it DOES allow identification of bigots who downvote for that reason, but it also does provide a means of harassing someone for a downvote.

Really, a cultural shift from "Downvote = disagree" to "Downvote =Anti-factual, low effort, or bot" is needed.

Maybe making upvotes counter downvotes is a decent start? Right now, kbin is weighted toward downvotes; some users with thousands of upvotes and hundreds of downvotes are sitting in the negatives.

Kbin uses boosts as upvotes for their karma calculation, which is why you see the QI style scoring. Strange system.

Yeah, that I get... it's just not intuitive for users. If downvote = -1 rep, then most people are going to assume that upvote = +1 rep, with boost being something like a "look at this post" option. But maybe that's just me?

I agree with you. It doesn't make sense to me. If it was me it would be =If(or(boost=1,upvote=1), karma=karma+1,karma=karma)

Yeah, this is a consequence of recent changes. It has already been fixed on the test instances. The changes will soon be implemented on kbin.social

One thing I love about kbin? @ernest is super responsive. Looks like we'll see a fix soon enough!

This is bug. It's fixed in dev. Shortly before the great migration started a change was made to bring kbin in line with lemmy but the bit that calculated the "karma" was missed and so it still uses boosts.

Not that I agree with the concept of karma.

Though I was skeptical at first, I much prefer the "positive votes only" style that some Lemmy instances use. If you don't have anything nice to say, etc etc etc. Downvotes, at least, seem to suppress peoples' willingness to discuss controversial opinions.

I understand, but it also makes it a lot more difficult to quickly make trolling and spam disappear.

I think the Lemmy instances that disable downvotes are also the instances that have more heavy-handed policies and moderation. They're essentially centralizing moderation to the admins and mods rather than relying on community self-policing through downvotes.

That's a very excellent point and shows the necessary trade-off to make that work.

Often, the option to downvote is the only thing stopping me from getting sucked into some stupid argument with an idiot. It is a massive productivity booster. Downvote and move on.

I wish kbin would hide posts with lots of downvotes...

Meh I'll say what's on my mind if I feel the need... whether ya like it or not doesnt trouble me

I've had some time to think about it and I think I actually like the current setup. "Boost" provides more visibility to a post, while "upvote" and "downvote" is synonymous with agree/disagree.

In a way, I can disagree with someone AND boost it. Disagreeing with someone doesn't have to be hostile. I think it would be healthy if a community could disagree with each other in a civil manner.

I also like that if someone disagrees, that person cannot influence if the post gets less visibility.

Except downvoting does reduce content's visibility, and people are downvoting content that they don't really have anything to do with because it shows up in their All feed. Certain niche magazines and magazines for vulnerable communities are at risk of vote bullying in the current system.

I see that ActivityPub makes it hard to do it and if it can’t be done then it should be visible (so people can know and act accordingly)

The only “alternative” approach I can see would be to have a per instance account that is given the activity (say upvote/downvote)

So… let’s say I’m on kbin.social and upvote this comment.

Kbin.social knowing me (since it’s my account) logs the upvote but does so as if single_instance_system_account@kbin.social did the upvote.

That is then what is replicated across the fediverse.

I assume that breaks the “intent” of the protocol and could be an issue but does let other instances decide to filter out that activity (if they decide to do so) by having some attribute or flag that denotes that this “account” is the fediverse instance account (e.g. not a user).

Boosts, however, should be shared since it’s like a retweet/shout out and are meant to be shared.

Of course that means I can no longer see my own upvote/downvote activity.

If that was also wanted then you could add a table that basically logs that but isn’t federated. E.g. a local instance reference that can be used for that instance to show the activity.

This way there’s less chance of an issue of somebody knowing a users account seeing activity like this:

  • A man, say in Iran, upvoted something about the prophet that somebody else found disrespectful

  • A christian teen upvoted something about atheism.

  • A woman reading about how to leave a domestic abuse situation.

  • Somebody curious about transgender reassignment

Either there needs to be a way to minimize the risks of such activity being seen/shared across the fediverse or it needs to be very very clear that even if you don’t see it that what you do is shouted across the fediverse and that others can and will be able to see it.

So what happens with 300 people downvote a post and 500 upvote it? For that to work you'd need an 'account' per post/vote/user combination. Now your instance has 1000's of bot accounts that are now indistinguishable from bad vote manipulation.

Yeah. Because each instance would have a record of that but there’s nothing to stop a bad actor from doing that on one instance and federating that out.

Of course a bad actor can set up their own instance and just create thousands of fake bot accounts and do the same.

Edit: The more I think about it @VerifiablyMrWonka the only way to do it would be to have some kind of activitypub transaction that is flagged as an instances reputation.

E.g. it’s the same as using the per instance account but it allows you to say “here’s how kbin.social” calculated the reputation/weight of this item.

And then each instance can opt to include that or not as they see fit. Maybe they federate with all instances but only show the weight/reputation “favorites”/“reduce” from those that they trust to maintain that info. Lemmy.world, sure, but the new instances such as haxor.1488.de.feder.at yeah… that’s probably a no so by default all of those don’t show/include in that instances feed.

Of course a bad actor can set up their own instance and just create thousands of fake bot accounts and do the same.

A competent admin would then just defederate from them. Easy. But now throw in that all kbin instances look like bot fests and what do you do? Maybe what lemmy.ml have done and just block kbin useragents at the firewall.

Having an aggregate account that just sends totals could work, but then vote brigading just became even easier. What's that aggregate bot? Did you just send a vote ratio of 300:1.9k for this comment? Lovely.

It's a very hard problem to solve and I'm not sure it's doable. The only thing keeping ActivityPub together is the fact that it's so transparent and bad actors are easily spotted and blocked. As soon as you muddy the waters the primary benefactor is the bad person.

That’s true. Just something to consider since there are real life bad actors and things can and will be a security/safety risk for some groups

It's not great, tbh. People just want to lurk, not potentially get shit on for what they're boosting.

I agree it's an odd choice. I had someone I don't know reduce my post and all my comments about becoming a dad. It's been a hard choice to not go and reduce all of their stuff in return ¯\(ツ)/¯ which I guess is why is a bad idea.

Alternatively, it's a good exercise in self-control and learning to ignore dumb petty things that don't matter. As I understand, there's something of a technical limitation; here due to the way the Fediverse works, that activity necessarily must be public in order to be federated. While Kbin could choose to simply not display the data, it would still be available if you or anyone else wanted to access it.

I'm still new to all this, but I read this was a difference between having an account on kbin vs lemmy, in that kbin federates who is voting, and lemmy federates only the total votes.

I don't think that's the case. I just checked a random post on lemmy.world, and I can see the two Lemmy users that upvoted a comment.

If you're lurking then why are you interacting? The two are mutually exclusive.

"Lurking" usually doesn't preclude voting, from my understanding of the term.

Lurking means reading without contributing. Perhaps voting could be encompassed in that on Reddit, but here on the Fediverse a vote is a public statement. It's akin to posting "This!"

I think that regular users don't really care, why would anyone obsess about tracking down which account liked which post? the only people who get into that sort of thing, are people who likely manipulate with multiple accounts themselves. and they don't wanna be traceable and that's why they're afraid of this feature.

I disagree wholeheartedly.

Having your voting history public also constrains people from participating in the community if the things they support or object to would cause harassment or harm from people who know who they are, which is not always preventable, for example a shared household, using kbin from work (activity monitored), etc...

I could easily see an Amazon worker getting fired because they were logged upvoting pro-union threads. They wouldn't even need to be doing this from a company network - just accessing kbin once on their network for any reason would have their user name associated with them, and then Amazon can simply monitor their activity on kbin even when they are using it from home.

Look at everything Amazon has done to their workers and tell me that this isn't a believable scenario. And that's just one example.

Having votes public can cause real harm to people.

As a regular user who doesnt like social media, this is something that all regular users should be aware of. You can easily get your info taken and processed in a way that becomes consistent with a shadow profile of you made by facebook or other companies in order to track you. There would be no difference in using kbin and using facebook if your info is open to everyone for companies to scrape and parse.

This will likely lead me to stop using kbin and wait for something more private oriented to come up

There's a very simple way to ensure that your upvote/downvote records aren't public; simply never upvote or downvote anything. I think it'd be fairly straightforward to add a user option to hide everything related to upvoting and downvoting from a user, giving them a kbin experience completely divested from that sort of thing.

That’s a great way to kill user engagement before it even starts.

They can still comment if they want. Indeed, without vote buttons that now becomes the only way to say "u suk" or "this!"

That’s a fair point. But there are people who live in situations where such activity has legal/societal implications.

Think some countries that put people to death for blasphemy or people in the states who associate being transgender with being literal child molesters.

Sure keep your account private but that isn’t always feasible even if you try. We see people get doxxed even from innocuous breadcrumbs of statements made over time.

Or don’t favorite/upvote and yet it’s easy to inadvertently do so which can be an issue.

That’s why I’m for a way to handle it, if possible, that minimizes the bad actors. And if not possible then it needs to be really really clear.

Like “upvote” is followed by something that succinctly notes “Favorite saved and ready to share across the fediverse”

why would anyone obsess about tracking down which account liked which post?

Normal people wouldn't. Unfortunately, there are a lot of assholes, stalkers, and people who are salty they got downvoted and want revenge.

Ever seen people on Reddit say "Whoever downvoted this, go fuck yourselves?" I can guarantee that, if they knew who downvoted them, they wouldn't keep their reaction contained to an edited comment.

This, pretty much. Though I do look at downvotes sometimes because its an easy was to identify trolls and bots, I'd be fine not seeing the option.

I think there's something to be said for it being public. If someone's downvoting all of your content for no reason without engaging with it, that's obviously not someone worth your time and it may be a decent idea to just block them. I could also imagine some communities making it explicitly against the rules to downvote constructive comments for no reason, for instance.

At any rate, my understanding is that the actions must be at least publicly accessible in order for federation to work, so the only thing that Kbin could do is simply not openly display that data. Perhaps making it less accessible would reduce the temptation to look, but it'll always be available to anyone who truly wants to see.

Yes, on par I lean towards it being a good thing as publicly available information rather than shadowy mud-slinging. I had one post downvoted by someone who apparently has done nothing else before or since, which takes a bit of the sting out of it. There will probably be debates about it at some point, and probably the occasional tit-for-tat attacks around the place, but overall I think it does link a bit more identity to the person who does the up- or down-voting which creates more of a community feel instead of hiding behind total anonymity.

The data is accessible by nature, and we will probably soon have scripts and extension which will trigger a war of downvotes and counter-downvotes and bot attrition.

The easy solution to half of that is to just eliminate down votes. I don't think they're anywhere near as useful as people seem to want to believe.

I disagree with you.

I've seen downvoting used very often to very quickly make trolls, spam, and highly offensive attacks disappear at the bottom.

I've not seen that on the Fediverse yet, but I have definitely seen comments that were merely unpopular opinions being heavily downvoted.

I'm thinking this might be a nice user-configurable option. If you don't think downvotes are valuable, disable them for yourself and you'll see the site as if downvotes didn't exist. Maybe another option could eliminate voting entirely, which would solve the privacy concerns too.

There is something to be said for sorting indicators being local-only. It increases the value of the local server population. This would increase privacy by not needed to transmit that information across the network. It would also decrease the burden on instances to processes those remote actions.

It would probably make large communities unparsable from small instances, though.

I tend to agree. I don't think any of that activity should be public. It doesn't really serve a purpose anyway, and it is an easy metric to scrape for data collection on users...

Hopefully there might be an option to keep this sort of thing private in account settings soon. Reddit let you choose what account activity is publicly visible, and I see no reason why Lemmy shouldn't have this feature, as well.

Hidden would be a more accurate word, as the way ActivityPub works means that data has to be sent to every instance so gaining access to it isn't very hard. It can never be truly anonymous or private.
The way it works in Kbin makes more sense if you think less of Reddit and more of Twitter instead - Boosts (original Kbin upvotes) are retweets and repost it to your followers, Favourites/Upvotes are likes.

Although the amount of people who don't realise that Twitter likes are public is amusing.

Yep, I already noticed a few people downvoting a full page of my comments, even when I post some neutral stuff like bash code for mounting stuff on ubuntu. It didn't work on reddit but here it does. I did the test with someone pointing at my reputation, I was able to grind like 40 reputation from him by simply downvoting everything he said in comments.

The problem is not just the number, it's the impression that other people will get from your post. It will induce confusion and misinterpretation.

Also, the content you write is duplicated around instances, so there is no deletion possible of your content "a la reddit". Once you write something it's duplicated elsewhere and you won't have jurisdiction there. So if you ever get doxxed it's over, so careful with what you write.

Reddit's comments were archived by third parties too, it's possible to download a backup of everything ever posted to it. Ironically enough the API changes will make that a lot harder to accomplish now, though it can still be done.

Even more ironically I'm using this offline backup to dig out my comments id's so I can delete them surgically in the live database.

Turned out that I had more than 30k comments on reddit. Just to give an idea of how much of reddit content can remain if you delete using the API in a "normal" way. I managed to only delete like 900 of them in the "normal" way.

If I had more time I would have made a double entry database where a user could return a list of his comments id's based on his username. That would have purged the database way more efficiently.

Since I will likely never come this close to an opportunity to brag about it again, as of last night I had 53,532 Reddit comments in my own offline archive of "things I've commented on." I've been using a script to copy them for future reference, after this long on Reddit I find myself semi-frequently thinking "haven't I had this argument before?" And then on checking finding that yes I did, four years ago. Simplifies things greatly to be able to copy and paste chunks of my old arguments into the new thread.

The last bit is not strictly true - if you delete a post/comment it will federate the deletion so it will (should) delete everywhere. Any hosts which are off-line or later defederated might still keep a copy of it though, or a user client may have it cached. "Be careful with what you write" is always good advice regardless!

Are edits transferred to other instances? I would imagine so.

No guarantee they get the edits. Plus every instance can store older versions if they want and provide a 'edit history', whether that's a part of the current protocol or not it is technically possible.

Just like how someone can archive anything on the internet really.

People should consider everything they do online to be public and trackable. If anonymity is important, it requires direct planning and effort to achieve. Data processing is so powerful and only getting stronger. Companies can learn more about you than you'd think without ever having access to your "PII".

Meh. I don't really think this is a big issue. But my attitude to privacy is ... non-standard.

It is interesting. It might even help negate hivemind behaviour because your name is tied to your actions.

thats my thinking. im on the fence, but it does force accountability for people who downvote for no reason

It also constrains people from participating in the community if the things they support or object to would cause harassment or harm from people who know who they are, which is not always preventable, for example a shared household, using kbin from work (activity monitored), etc...

I could easily see an Amazon worker getting fired because they were logged upvoting pro-union threads. They wouldn't even need to be doing this from a company network - just accessing kbin once on their network for any reason would have their user name associated with them, and then Amazon can simply monitor their activity on kbin even when they are using it from home.

It's worth experimenting with.

Over on Reddit, the RES extension keeps track of who you upvote and downvote and will display a little indicator next to their username telling you the tally of your personal upvote/downvote total for him. I rarely ever remembered people by name, but it was notable to me when I'm reading through a thread and see someone flagged [+100] or whatever.

With the Fediverse, you could actually flag users with two values - your total upvote/downvotes for him, and his total upvote/downvotes for you. That'd be interesting to see.

I feel like there's up and downsides to the data being public.

Anonymity breeds aggression online, so making it such that anyone can see who voted and how they voted would serve to make people think more about how they vote, and maybe shame some against bring trolls.

On the other hand, it makes it much easier to track users, which while not malicious on surface, could be used by 3rd parties or other users to track/stalk particular users - which could be used for harassment.

I think the latter has the potential to be a much bigger downside, so I think it would be best to anonymous voters, or at least the direction in which they voted.

I'm not worried about votes being visible. It might be good if they can be rate limited per user though, so you don't get grumpy people going on a downvote party.

https://kbin.social/m/kbinMeta/t/90572/Upvotes-Downvotes-and-boosts-being-visible-on-posts

This has been discussed a lot. The view I articulated in the previous thread is that this generally might be a good thing - it discourages the 'downvote to disagree' culture that developed on Reddit, and nudges people into being more thoughtful before flippantly hitting the downvote button if they know someone might turn around and ask them why they downvoted.

As long as that's made clear up front, OK. It might make it tougher for online support communities within kbin. Even if you used an alternate account, you wouldn't be able to share anything too personal. On the other hand, maybe kbin is saying that's a responsibility they can't take on. They can always link to external support sites I suppose.

Why would votes being public make it so that alt accounts (throwaways) would be less effective than they were on reddit or any other public forum?

I think privacy is important but even in public online places, like the fediverse, it is possible to maintain anonymity if it's desired through curation of what information you post, where you post it, and with which account.

Thanks for the heads up!

If I see something I like, I upvote and boost but necessarily this shouldn't be visible in detail.

Boosting is like retweeting so that basically has to be public. You're sharing the comment with your followers.