Reddit is starting to suck more and more everyday so here I am. A couple of questions -

  1. I created my account at lemmy.ca, but most people I have seen have lemmy.world accounts. Am I missing out on anything by not having a lemmy.world account?

  2. Reddit has an offical subreddit for Reddit news. Does Lemmy have any offical communities?

  3. On Reddit, you can’t post on some subreddits if you do not have enough karma or if your account is not old enough. Are there any rules like that on Lemmy?

Thank you!

  • Dandroid@sh.itjust.works
    93·
    3 months ago

    Votes being public is one of my main turn offs of Lemmy. Anyone can host their own instance that federates with everyone and peek inside the database and see everything you’ve ever up voted or downvoted. I have personally done this just to confirm my suspicions that it is possible. I don’t vote on a lot of things I otherwise would because I don’t want people making assumptions about me. For example, if I see a copy/paste bot spamming a pro trans comment, even though I agree with the message, I might want to downvote because it is a spam bot. But I’m afraid that if someone sees that comment in a list of my downvotes without any context, they will incorrectly think I’m transphobic.

    • Lvxferre@mander.xyz
      4·
      3 months ago

      I get what you’re saying: assumers (individuals who vomit conclusions based on little to no info) have access to this sort of info as much as decent people do. And if they’re in a position of power, they can ruin your day.

      However:

      1. If we’re going to stop doing things because an assumer might interpret them wrong, we do nothing.
      2. As a local saying goes, “diarrhoea doesn’t happen only once”. If some assumptive piece of shit is, for example, banning you because it assumed why you downvoted a certain post/comment, they’re likely banning other people under the same reason. This is the sort of situation where you should gang up and throw shit on the fan - transparency might benefit them, but it should also benefit you.

      (In this example the right thing to do, if you notice that a post is being potentially downvoted due to transphobia, is to check the voting patterns of the poster. If they’re transphobic they’ll be downvoting any trans-positive post; if they’re just against bots they’ll be downvoting other bot posts regardless of message. Due diligence is not a “nice to have”, it’s obligatory - and, alongside basic reasoning, it’s what tells activists and slacktivists apart.)

    • imPastaSyndrome@lemm.ee
      73·
      3 months ago

      But I’m afraid that if someone sees that comment in a list of my downvotes without any context, they will incorrectly think I’m transphobic.

      You could also not care what the type of person who would go to THOSE lengths (see: mentally unwell) thinks…

      • kitnaht@lemmy.world
        71·
        3 months ago

        When that type of person controls your access to content, you typically are going to care. The people who see those votes are the ones that control if you get to participate or not.

    • TrickDacy@lemmy.world
      31·
      3 months ago

      Votes being public is news to me. But regardless, how does anyone even do it? The apps and web uis I have seen don’t show that anywhere so do you think people are querying the API directly just for such a weird use case? I don’t find that likely.

      • Ludrol@szmer.info
        5·
        3 months ago

        You need to be an admin or mod to see the votes. There are discussions to make the votes public for everyone.

      • Dandroid@sh.itjust.works
        3·
        3 months ago

        Yes, as the other person said, you need to be an admin or mod. As an admin, you have raw database access. I crafted an SQL query using a couple of joins of I think 3 tables, and I was able to provide a comment or post ID, and it would return a list of people who have upvoted or downvoted it.

        The problem is though that anyone can be an admin. You could set up your own instance and do this if you want.

    • 9point6@lemmy.world
      2·
      3 months ago

      Interesting, I was of the understanding that the individual vote attribution doesn’t leave the community’s home instance and only aggregated counts are federated.

      Given an instance spun up for this purpose would very likely not host any communities I’d be interacting with, it wouldn’t get much more information than you can already get through the UI/API

      Am I wrong on this?

      • Dandroid@sh.itjust.works
        2·
        3 months ago

        If I’m understanding what you’re saying then yes, you are wrong about this.

        I hosted my own instance and was able to see the usernames of people who voted on communities that were not hosted on my instance. To prove my point, I had posted the list of votes on a comment that was claiming it was impossible to do this.

        • 9point6@lemmy.world
          4·
          3 months ago

          Well that’s not good news. This feels like a bit of a problem because a lot of people probably wouldn’t vote on stuff they otherwise would, out of fear of attracting the attention of some nutjob with too much time on their hands.

          It kinda flies in the face of the “downvote (and maybe report) then move on” attitude that most of us will have taken on from Reddit.

          I wonder if the devs have plans to correct this as I don’t see how this won’t limit engagement from good users aware of this and amplify toxic ones (due to people not downvoting out of fear of retaliation).

          • Dandroid@sh.itjust.works
            4·
            3 months ago

            I think the devs like this design. They are currently contemplating making votes public for everyone. There is a discussion on their GitHub about it. They opened the discussion and asked if the users want to make all votes visible on the UI. If it happens, I will probably stop voting altogether.