Is is possible to see who upvoted/downvoted a specific comment?
I read on reddit that on Lemmy you can see users' upvote/downvote history. I therefore expected to be able to see upvote/downvote breakdown by user for my own comments. But couldn't find this. Does this feature exist or is that a myth?
Hmmm, tbh, I don't think that's a feature I'd want. Every now and again you see "that guy" furious that he's getting downvotes, doubling down and trying to start an argument or something. I don't need that guy showing up in my DMs.
It actually already is a feature. Kbin puts it upfront, and I think lemmy also has a way to access it.
I think it remains to be seen whether or not it’s a good idea.
I’ve seen some people say they like the idea because it make people think twice about downvoting - it cuts back on the instinctive “I don’t like this so I am gonna downvote.”
But, as you said, do we really want people coming after you because you downvoted them? There are crazy ass people out there, and if you ever get doxxed it could be a problem.
Maybe that last point is hyperbole, but crazy people are gonna do crazy things.
"karma" (as reddit calls scoring) never was more true to its name. :)
I haven't looked at Lemmy's implementation of upvotes/downvotes, but they should be ActivityPub activities, so it means they should appear by making a request to the user's actor.
EDIT: I've just checked random users outbox (that's the ActivityPub name for the list of activities), included mine, they are actually just empty. So that probably means that Lemmy is only publishing the upvotes/downvotes when pushing activities to federated servers, which would make those activities way more private, although not completely : someone could setup their own instance to learn about them, and it's best to be assume that at some point, someone will start such instance and publish an app revealing all votes for everybody (plus, as others mentioned, Kbin is already doing it).
Yeah, having it on your user page is much less dangerous, imo. Still a possibility of getting called out if you downvote someone you're arguing with, but you're already in the comments there.
The only way I see a problem is if someone writes a bot or extension that reads the user profile into something "per comment", and if that gets enough traction and use to build up a strong database. However, in that case, I'd imagine the Lemmy devs would build a feature to let instance admins hide that information from regular users.
If you aren't willing to own your interactions with people, maybe you shouldn't be doing it? Why do you feel the need to hide? Thought processes like this are what leads to toxicity online. If you aren't willing to own your comments and votes, you shouldn't be allowed to interact with people in a community.
We call people that want to be negative online while remaining anonymous a troll. Don't be a troll.
On Lemmy, it's available on the AP available in the database, so an admin instance can get that, but I don't know of any client that offers the feature
What are downvotes seen by kbin users on lemmy content? It could just be the kbin instance's local downvotes of the federated content but I never noticed a lack of down votes on lemmy-hosted content when I was running a personal kbin instance.
That's true, but I don't think any search engines care about the Fediverse for the moment. There's not a lot of money to be made on all of these ad-free websites. With the relatively small communities it's also not a great source for stealing AI training data from.
Plus, the fact the content is mirrored all over the place probably triggers clone/bot detection, with clickable links to other Fediverse instances triggering the anti-bot measures.
A huge network of pages mostly linking to each other, all replicating each other's contents, sounds like a textbook example of SEO abuse.
Also without identifying the user it becomes hard to know what's a unique like and what is a duplicate. I suppose a workaround would be for the user's instance to keep a record of who liked what, and then just issue just the unique like IDs (which can be traced back to the user only on their home instance).
It would need to be a bit smart. Say the same user toggles their upvote on and off. The upvote for a given topic I think would need to be a hash of the topic/comment ID + user ID so that the same ID would be re-issued to prevent the upvotes/cancels falling out of sync.
It's a lot of effort really for keeping something such as a like private.
It would also open the door for rogue instances to send out massive downvote counts without any data to back that up. That's not to say you couldn't already do that with fake users, but it's much easier to identify a mass of fake users than it is to identify a mass of fake downvotes as a number.
If votes are federated somebody could theoretically make a fork of Lemmy that will show who voted, but that instance has to federate with all other instances