If you want Lemmy to grow and not be completely overrun with bots posting propaganda and signal boosting extremism, showing votes is the only way forward. It's the only mechanism by which independent parties can discover and expose things like "every post and comment by this account is upvoted by these 20 other accounts that have never posted and whose names follow the same formula".

The privacy you're mourning never existed in the first place and it can't exist on any platform. For Lemmy, it's required for federation. On sites like Reddit, you have privacy from other users, but not from the company or anyone they sell that data to.

Since true privacy isn't an option, it would be far better to be open about that lack of privacy. This thread is already riddled with people who thought their votes were private, rather than just inconvient to look up. That's far more dangerous and deceptive.

This needs to happen, regardless of the ill-informed tantrums it may cause. If you want to upvote pornography without it being used against you, create accounts that are strictly for pornography and properly compartmentalize your accounts.

[–] auzy@lemmy.world 5 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

Problem is, it actually encourages a hive mind. I've already had 2 people try to bully me.

I'd go one step further. Upvotes down votes and totals should be hidden entirely. This would encourage people to post based on their own without external influence It reduces the incentive to use bots

[–] PoliticalAgitator@lemmy.world -4 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Problem is, it actually encourages a hive mind. I've already had 2 people try to bully me.

Then tell those people to get fucked.

I'd go one step further. Upvotes down votes and totals should be hidden entirely.

Unless you have an actual implementation of how that would work, telling us "what you'd do" is just a fantasy. You can't "hide" things from federation -- they're either included, removed or made inconvenient to access.

Does "posting without external influence" even have any value besides sounding cool? The entire concept of Lemmy and Reddit is that external influence floats and sinks content. If you want unranked, anonymous content, you want 4chan (which is of course riddled with extremists and good content is almost entirely drowned out with worthless shitposts).

Personally, I'd rather that "external influence" was as fair and open and accountable as possible, rather than "I wonder if 500 of those votes are just Russian bots".

[–] auzy@lemmy.world 3 points 3 months ago (1 children)

My implementation would be hide it from the UI by default for instances

Also, never said unranked.. I meant simply hide the rankings. Part of the disadvantage of showing the totals on the UI means that high upvotes make it seem like it was highly popular. It also means that people don't mindlessly upvote posts simply because there were a lot of upvotes. By hiding them, you know its popular, but no how popular. It changes the way people interact so it's more normal.

Showing Upvotes/downvotes doesn't show whether they are bots are not. It just means they'll upvote/downvote more random shit and mess around wit the rest of the posts, so more crap rises to the top because they're interfering with the rankings.

There are easier ways to identify bots.. And, it just aids abusive people. I don't think it will assist with bots at all.. Sorry.

[–] PoliticalAgitator@lemmy.world -1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

Also, never said unranked.. I meant simply hide the rankings

Sounds trash to me. Fortunately it would be trivial for me to add them back in because again, all you're doing is making the information inconvenient.

It also means that people don't mindlessly upvote posts simply because there were a lot of upvotes

Is that how your mind works? I've never once done this and I'm extremely skeptical that anyone does. Sounds to me like you don't like the content and have decided that nobody really does, they're just upvoting it because it was upvoted.

Showing Upvotes/downvotes doesn't show whether they are bots are not. It just means they'll upvote/downvote more random shit and mess around wit the rest of the posts, so more crap rises to the top because they're interfering with the rankings.

A log of votes is the data you need to discover bots. It doesn't magically reveal them, nor did I claim it would.

Voting on random shit might make a slightly more plausible voting log for a bot but that's going to be far more obvious than you think, won't actually interfere with the rankings if it's truly random and once again, not having rankings shown doesn't address this problem either.

Votes and rankings are always knowable, even if you hide them from the UI. If there is a pressure to make bots plausible through random voting, that pressure exists regardless of it being shown on the default UI. All you're doing is misleading users about what information they're exposing.

There are easier ways to identify bots

Describe them.

And, it just aids abusive people

You've already claimed to be a victim of them and your solution does nothing to address it. You're just adding another value to the list of poorly obscured information, because it's what you personally want.

[–] auzy@lemmy.world 1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

Yes, bias is a thing. Ever hear of the placebo effect? It gives people a bias before clicking the link.

In fact, showing rankings actually makes it easier for bots because of that bias, they just randomly click stuff to appear neutral, and upvote their target posts, which when they say +1.4k, you'll be biased into thinking it's a popular opinion. Hence why hiding them by default actually maybe has benefits. There are no advantages to seeing the votes other than abuse. Name some.

As you said, they're already accessible, so there is no point of bloating the code. Let's not make them even more so and encourage abuse.

What problem is being solved here by doing this?

[–] PoliticalAgitator@lemmy.world -1 points 3 months ago

After reading your exciting new definition of the placebo effect and being asked to "name some advantages" that have been in every comment I've made, I think I know everything I need to about the quality of your opinions.

[–] Valmond@lemmy.world -4 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Hear hear!

Well said and argued.

[–] PoliticalAgitator@lemmy.world -2 points 3 months ago

Thanks.