Edit: obligatory explanation (thanks mods for squaring me away)…
What you see via the UI isn’t “all that exists”. Unlike Reddit, where everything is a black box, there are a lot more eyeballs who can see “under the hood”. Any instance admin, proper or rogue, gets a ton of information that users won’t normally see. The attached example demonstrates that while users will only see upvote/downvote tallies, admins can see who actually performed those actions.
Edit: To clarify, not just YOUR instance admin gets this info. This is ANY instance admin across the Fediverse.
I agree with everything you’re saying, but it’s frustrating that people are jumping to conclusions to think this is deliberate, nefarious etc…
Lemmy, being a federated system has different practical realities to Reddit. You can’t have a federated system with multiple instances each with their own admins, and have it function without cutting off data flow. For voting to work in a federated system, vote data must flow, and people need to understand this.
Reddit was **not **a federated system, so there was no need for vote data to flow, and people also need to appreciate this difference.
The only solution is to remove voting. It’s as simple as that.
Maybe long term a system could be devised.
I’m not in denial, i do firmly believe that is is an issue, and that it WILL be abused by someone. But I’m also a realist, and the features we have can’t survive without voting data. People need to be aware of this, i think it’s fair that everyone knows the risks. At an individual level people can choose not to vote, and thus have no vote data associated with them, but i suspect there might be more than vote data, i don’t know for sure without looking at the code, but I suspect saved posts might be a privacy concern.
Personal opinion, i think abuse will happen, but it will be limited, just a feel i have. I do however suspect this abuse will exponentially ramp up if lemmy gets big traction.