rglullis

This feels a bit of a conversation-shutting argument. Lots of things (good and bad) will happen on a platform that has billions of users. The real question is to about many of those instances happened solely due to the data being (easily) available to the public.

In any case, I really don't think that the solution to the problem of targeted harassment is by providing quote-unquote-privacy. Today, people want to obfuscate votes. Tomorrow it will be subscription lists and later it will be even posts/comments. By then it will be better to just use a closed network or just go full darknet. I'd rather we spent more time educating the people on how to use actually secure and private communications platform instead of sacrificing Transparency and Accountability for the sake of a vocal minority who will keep trying to turn the "Open Social Web" (which is meant to be open and public) into their exclusive, cocooned service.

How many people downvote content they agree with or find funny but doesn’t add to the discussion?

Again, this is only a problem because we have lost this sense of shared culture. If we really want to have an established "community", these guidelines will have to be one way or another be restored and enforced.

How many more complaints about downvote bullying are mods going to have to field?

Here is an idea: instead of trying to remove power from people, let's give more of it. Hiding votes is hard, but creating a finer-grained permission system for moderation is not. Let's build a system where mods can assign other mods for specific types of reports. Then, we can have few mods who would be "all powerful" like they are now and we could have a bunch of "issue-specific" trusted users who could access/triage specific reports.

We shouldn't need mods to figure out what is "basic" spam and we shouldn't need powerful mods to say "user A is reporting that B has downvoted their last 5 posts in different conversations. This is a violation of the community rules and therefore should be banned."

I don’t normally waste my time downvoting a post I’m writing a rebuttal to, but when they are downvoting me I tend to do it back. I think if everyone had easy access, they would hunt down their down voters posts and retaliate regardless of the quality of the comments

That would stop as soon as people start reporting this behavior to mods who felt enabled to ban users based on unjustified downvoting.

1. Admins could modify the activity, but users can verify from outside (if they so which). If the user data gets obfuscated, it becomes a complete black box.
2. But then you have two different events.
3. Here is one problem: the userbase on the Fediverse is already ridiculously small. If we keep dividing ourselves over every little preference, we will end up with nothing but a thousand little ghetto fiefdoms, used by people who will never ever learn how to tolerate a different point of view.
4. No. What will happen is that the silent majority will want to keep federation with everyone, but the intolerant minority will keep pushing instance admins to defederate from anyone who does not want to obfuscate votes. Eventually, LW will make a decision one way or another and everyone else will just have to decide if they want to stick with their principles or follow the leader so that they are not isolated.

I'm so, so glad to see I am not the only one that thinks this way.

1. You are still trusting the instance admin. What if the admin pushes a code patch that transforms every like into a dislike based on a keyword?
2. Your history will never be fully portable.
3. It creates some weird dynamic: are we going to start dividing ourselves into "instances that obfuscate voting" and "instances that prefer transparency"?
4. What is the criteria for "malicious"?

We can fix that by having moderators that can establish clear guidelines and show enough authority and can be trusted by the community. And yes, if the guidelines include something like:

Downvotes are not for disagreement. It's fine to downvote if the argument is false or deliberately misleading, but if someone is making a good faith argument that you disagree with, either make a constructive response or simply let it go

Then the mods would be completely justified to call out users who are drive-by downvoting.

I mean in the specific case of "giving vote visibility to everyone will cause more harassment based on who-voted-on-what". It's theoretical because this has not been implemented yet.

Then what is the point of hashing the data? Just use an UUID.

Anyway, this is all pointless bike shedding because the activity needs to be associated with the actor, as it can only be accepted if the signature can be verified.

Not privacy-protecting. You can easily deduct the voter by enumeration.

environment more hostile to discussion and honest exchange.

"Voting" and "discussion" are separate things. The old forums did not have voting but still had polarization, personal attacks, hellthreads, etc.

The problem is that Reddit/Facebook turned "voting" from a tool meant to measure "quality" (e.g, this post is relevant to the community, this comment does not add to the discussion) into a tool to measure "popularity" (I agree with this, so I vote up. I don't like this, so I downvote).

Either get rid of voting altogether, or let's bring back a culture where "votes" are meant to signal quality.

Yeah, I do my best to avoid cliched references, but this is 100% a "blue pill/red pill" dilemma. The majority of people seem to prefer to live a comfortable lie than face the harsh truth.