Anyone else getting these donation ads? Was it just shoved onto an update by the Lemmy devs, or is this coming from the instance admins? It doesn’t seem to show on clean browser sessions to lemmy.ca
Anyone else getting these donation ads? Was it just shoved onto an update by the Lemmy devs, or is this coming from the instance admins? It doesn’t seem to show on clean browser sessions to lemmy.ca
Mbin doesn’t provide transparency for downvotes
So by your logic, just because they don’t provide all available forms of transparency means they don’t provide any? You are just searching for a “gotcha” when it isn’t even a counterpoint.
As to why,
That particular exception exists, it doesn’t take too much effort to find out why: https://github.com/MbinOrg/mbin/issues/1115 Among other things, Mbin was threatened to be blocked by Lemmy on default for part of its functionality by the Lemmy devs, and melroy decided to succumb to the pressure rather than split the fediverse on this issue. Honestly, I find the main Lemmy devs to be compromised given how much they want narratives to head in a particular political direction and the tool that lack of transparency on downvotes provides for that in regards to shaping visibility and discussion within threads. It wasn’t like that for a long time, but you knew that.
I didn’t say they don’t provide any, I said that their transparency isn’t complete.
If someone wants to have full votes transparency nowadays, using a Lemmy instance that federates lemvotes provides transparency on both up and downvotes, while Mbin only gives upvotes.
Not sure if Mbin support lemvotes, but even if it does, then it’s similar to Lemmy: you have to use lemvotes to have full transparency
Lemvotes isn’t foolproof, and just because something isn’t complete doesn’t mean it doesn’t have it. Although Lemvotes is another good example of how baseless the “voting privacy” argument is.
If I propose Mbin, it’s because between Lemmy and Piefed it has the most voting transparency, it doesn’t have to be perfect. I’d rather advertise instances that move towards it than those that move away with it due to ridiculous concepts like “voting privacy”.
To put it in the words that can illustrate the ideological hypocrisy surrounding it better, it is essentially a tool of the “bourgeois” to obfuscate general access to the “proletariat” of the user base. People have enough power to pseudonymize their votes to anonymous accounts, so it is a testament of insecurity to try to use dark patterns to hide access to it when it is readily accessible through sites like lemvotes to even the most hostile of parties. The sky hasn’t come down because these sites exist, and rather than the issue being the small minority of the people who might abuse them, I suspect it might be due to the insecurities of the people who downvote frequently or purposefully.
You speak as if the fediverse has a supermajority of support for public voting. I don’t think it does. I think it certainly has a majority of support, but not a supermajority. I’ve been in threads where users have complained about Lemmy’s public voting and objected loudly about Piefed changing their system to incorporate public voting. Rimu straddled both sides completely transparently and came it with about as equitable an outcome as he could with the private non-federated voting and public federated voting.
This is pretty open.
Transparency isn’t a popularity game, but it is the fallback when the arguments against it have been exhausted or rebutted. Ironically enough (or the opposite thereof), reactionary populism is the sort of thing a lack of transparency within these systems stimulate since it allows the artificial simulation of a group for users susceptible to group psychology.
Not everything devolves into a popularity game. You are thinking of a reality show.
You’re talking about ‘transparency’ in the accountability context. Transparency of voting, transparency of public posting history etc. I’m referring to it terms of honesty from the developer here about what they want, and reading into what the audience wants and why they want it.
Every site has to make some balance between privacy and transparency for its userbase. If the majority of a website audience does want some interaction on the site to be private, to be obfuscated, something that if made private would have consequences to the sites operations - then that’s what they want. I think it would be bad if Rimu just said “screw everyone, I’ll do what I like” and overruled the prevailing opinion.
But in any case, as I said, your criticism is not of piefed here but piefed.social as other instances could have always just implemented public voting entirely regardless of what piefed.social chose to do.
If a majority of an audience wants something, then they can fork. That’s how open source works. If I considered the issue significant enough and worth the hassle, I could fork it - with varying degrees of success depending on how skilled I was at doing so. Security through obscurity is a big no-no in open source, and that’s what this private voting is. Mbin, lemvotes, or just setting up your own instance as an admin - there are plenty of workarounds to get at the data for a bad actor, it just feeds speculation and manipulation for a problem that isn’t there, and a popularity contest is not a counterargument.
“Screw everyone, I’ll do what I like” is a hallmark of every principled open source developer, a tradition set by Linus Torvalds himself. People don’t use their software because it is a popularity contest - there’s no shortage of popularity contests that have been excluded from the Linux kernel - people use it because the function meets the demand, and the democratic recourse if they don’t like it are forks.
Yes, they can run their own. But obviously people will pressure an instance that is used more than instances that are not. In terms of lemmy, the public policy of lemmy.world is up for more litigation than lemmy.today. Same goes with piefed.social.
But in any case, your argument is still not criticism of piefed - but purely piefed.social.
Let’s just agree to disagree
On the other hand, I agree with you that votes should be public, but there are a lot of people who want them private