- cross-posted to:
- fediverse@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- fediverse@lemmy.world
I really wanted to post this on !traaaaaaannnnnnnnnns@hexbear.net but I’m not trans myself and I didn’t want to take up their space.
Basically, the devs of Lemmy are looking to make upvotes public to everyone. Right now, I believe voter identities are known to server admins and mods.
I don’t have a strong opinion on this myself, either for or against, as I write this comment, but I’m wondering if there’s something I’m missing, frankly as a cishet dude.
But also… I’ve kinda lost trust in Nutomic making decisions about the software that won’t make things worse for trans people since his comments on the Olympics were made public. Dessalines has (so far) at least tolerated Nutomic’s transphobia despite whatever prior rhetoric. Frankly, I am suspicious that trans people don’t matter to the Lemmy dev team…to be charitable…so I’d really like to hear your thoughts.
I am mixed on this, I feel kinda this way but also literally everyone ever has felt this about their time and new technologies or trends. There is evidence that some people appear to be harmed by the light boxes of dopamine but evidence for broad harms is much less good. I can imagine worlds in which the internet was better, but also ones in which it is much worse. When we do look at stuff like worsening mental health outcomes in younger people it’s a giant mess of correlated thing, from soc med to worsening economic outlook, climate disasters, reductions in freedom, reductions in physical activity, enclosure etc. To point the finger at any one and emphasise it feels reductive.
If we have reasons to believe that making a technology is harmful we should not do that, but if a technology is available gatekeeping it behind something unrelated to potential to be harmful (e.g. in the votes case the ability to spin up a server. There is no reason to believe this correlates with sound judgement about exposing yourself to the information) is at best patronising. Generally elites have a really terrible track record of making decisions for other people. So I think once the genie is out of the bottle, absent strong evidence to do so, we need to give people access to it.