I recently learned that voting on lemmy is not anonymous. Anyone can get information about who has upvoted and downvoted a post or comment.
In combination with your IP, this is a massive privacy (maybe even physical security) risk. Also, people can target you for your votes.
Sadly, this is something where I would prefer Reddit over Lemmy. Big tech scrapes data from both places anyways, at least Reddit is safe.
Yeah, at worst it’s a necessary evil to prevent a rogue user on a second instance from mass downvoting. Your username is tied to your vote, because otherwise a rogue user could just spam downvotes at whatever they didn’t like.
Instance 1 has a post. Instance 2 has a user who disagrees with that post. User is able to spam downvotes, because instance 2 is not binding their username to the vote. So Instance 1 has no way of knowing if the votes are multiple different users, or all one user. The only real solution here is to disable external voting, but the entire point of the fediverse is cross-compatibility and self-hosting. By binding the username to the vote, instance 1 is able to detect repeat votes and disregard them.
Public votes do absolutely nothing to stop people from making a bunch of users on a bunch of instances and voting from those users. Voting agents are a simple solution to the issue, since you can still just ban the voting agent if it seems problematic.
But there’s a deeper context here, which is we are drawing a weird line between voting being a fundamental, if not critical part of the application, but also apparently grounds for imposing sanctions on users for doing it wrong? That’s a fundamentally flawed mechanic no matter how you swing it, since you can’t standardize any singular set of rules, and we are already seeing a rapid escalation of tit for tat vote bans. This is just unsustainable and is pushing things towards an obvious endpoint where there is such a chilling effect on voting that it negates the entire utility of the mechanic for sorting and content curation.
This is just further evidence that we just shouldn’t have a downvote option at all.
No, downvotes are more important than upvotes
I agree, except we should leave the basic mechanic and just make it a placebo.
Important to note here, too, is that ip addresses of users arent synced across instances.
This is only a problem for people who care about the reputation of their user account - which is something people should be rotating out anyway if they care about their privacy.