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?
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.
What if the post is edited at a later time? Then all those votes become invalid. It's not practical with the way ActivityPub is designed. Honestly, it's designed the way it is for a reason... if you aren't willing to own your participation on a public forum, you shouldn't be on a public forum.
I was suggesting (I actually clearly said it in both comments) hashing the post/comment ID + userid NOT the content. Just enough info to get a unique ID. We don't need it not to be non-reversible. Just a unique ID for the like.
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.