I am literally here, now, commenting on this because I am reading the article to this on reddit and … I can’t believe they are going to start punishing upvotes! That is the final stray for Reddit. Its dead. Gone the way of Digg. I am literally here now to start moving over to Lemmy.
I just realized - and must keep in mind, with a federated platform like lemmy, all of your upvotes and downvotes are broadcasted across the network. ANYONE could track your upvotes and downvotes in THIS system.
If an instance becomes oppressive, nothing is stopping you from going to a new one. You can’t do that with Reddit. Let’s say my instance Lemmy.ca becomes awful, I can make a new account on another and still comment on this community. That’s the beauty of the Fediverse.
So keep that in mind when interacting with the fediverse
These are public forums, it’s almost the point for things to be public. You could argue that votes shouldn’t be part of it, but ultimately due to the decentralized nature they must be communicated to all servers
Honestly, I don’t even like the downvote/upvote system because it promotes censorship and a lot of the times it’s just an agree/disagree button. I feel that no matter how right or wrong someone is, they should always be able to express their opinion in a civil manner (obviously there are mods for removing rule breaking posts/comments). Downvoting just kills any discussion.
There are upsides and downsides to everything. Open votes means it’s harder to manufacture consent. That’s something someone on Reddit could do, where they bot vote their own content to the top of the feed and nobody would be none the wiser because you don’t know how and when someone voted. And it’s not really a “could do”, it’s something that (at least a few years ago) happened regularly.
But on Lemmy voting is open so if someone starts up a bot farm to push their content to the top it is (relatively) easy to discover.
I am literally here, now, commenting on this because I am reading the article to this on reddit and … I can’t believe they are going to start punishing upvotes! That is the final stray for Reddit. Its dead. Gone the way of Digg. I am literally here now to start moving over to Lemmy.
I just realized - and must keep in mind, with a federated platform like lemmy, all of your upvotes and downvotes are broadcasted across the network. ANYONE could track your upvotes and downvotes in THIS system.
I had no idea how much I valued voting privacy.
You don’t have voting privacy here on Lemmy though, and theoretically instance admins could “punish” you based on voting patterns.
But decentralization helps that
If an instance becomes oppressive, nothing is stopping you from going to a new one. You can’t do that with Reddit. Let’s say my instance Lemmy.ca becomes awful, I can make a new account on another and still comment on this community. That’s the beauty of the Fediverse.
On the other hand, harvesting that sort of data is as simple as creating an instance and Federating with whatever sub you want to spy on
Is it really considered spying if the sub is pretty much shouting the information freely to whoever wants to request it?
I have intercepted this communication to say yes, it’s still spying! 🕵️
So keep that in mind when interacting with the fediverse
These are public forums, it’s almost the point for things to be public. You could argue that votes shouldn’t be part of it, but ultimately due to the decentralized nature they must be communicated to all servers
They already do, some instances or communities will ban you for downvoting everything.
Which is kinda fair, why are you here if everything displeases you?
Honestly, I don’t even like the downvote/upvote system because it promotes censorship and a lot of the times it’s just an agree/disagree button. I feel that no matter how right or wrong someone is, they should always be able to express their opinion in a civil manner (obviously there are mods for removing rule breaking posts/comments). Downvoting just kills any discussion.
You are not allowed to even nod at a reddit article anymore. The voting system on lemmy is broken though. Your votes shouldn’t follow you.
There are upsides and downsides to everything. Open votes means it’s harder to manufacture consent. That’s something someone on Reddit could do, where they bot vote their own content to the top of the feed and nobody would be none the wiser because you don’t know how and when someone voted. And it’s not really a “could do”, it’s something that (at least a few years ago) happened regularly.
But on Lemmy voting is open so if someone starts up a bot farm to push their content to the top it is (relatively) easy to discover.
What’s Digg?
Digg was a news and comment aggregation site before Reddit existed. It was pretty fantastic for its time. Reddit is like Digg on steroids.
Funny enough, Digg is making a comeback