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.

  • czech
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    1 year ago

    Activities are public and easily viewable on kbin. It’s been interesting. Seems mostly positive other than people harassing those who down-vote them demanding explanations.

    • MuddybulldogOP
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      1241 year ago

      Knowing they’re visible on kbin made me realize that most Lemmy users probably weren’t aware, as it’s non-obvious.

      • theinspectorst
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        601 year ago

        Yeah, I had a good natured discussion with a Lemmy user on feddit.uk the other day where they were still inexplicably downvoting my responses each time, despite us both being polite and constructive.

        It made me realise that a) they use the downvote button quite differently to how I use it and b) they probably didn’t know that I, as a kbinaut, could literally see they were the one downvoting.

        • 𝒍𝒆𝒎𝒂𝒏𝒏
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          91 year ago

          Just why would someone even do this 😆 I personally either upvote or leave no vote at all when replying… Did you tell them they’ve been busted?

        • WhiteHotaru
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          31 year ago

          I started a discussion on feddit.de about good discussion practice citing Karl Poppers rules of discussion and the use of the down and upvote buttons.

          I think discussion culture in the Fedivers is quite healthy at the moment.

      • czech
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        331 year ago

        Yea, good call. I wonder if kbin makes them viewable because the activity pub protocol does not allow them to be easily hidden.

        • @[email protected]
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          591 year ago

          Seems to be Ernest’s attitude about that sort of thing, he doesn’t like to hide things from the average user that someone more technically inclined would still be able to access

            • @[email protected]
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              1 year ago

              Yeah I think it’s great! I was on kbin originally but I’m a sucker for a nice app UI. I’ll definitely be using it more once the apps are here.

              I also can’t find my lemm.ee community through kbin and I think it’s some kind of federation issue, I’m sure it will get fixed.

              • Coelacanth
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                51 year ago

                Kbin and Lemmy are having huge federation issues at the moment, with stuff from Lemmy commonly having a multiple hour delay before showing on Kbin and sometimes it doesn’t show up at all. It might be a bug so we’ll see how it works when the next Lemmy version comes out.

                • @[email protected]
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                  31 year ago

                  Let’s be fair, lemmy instances are having the same issues federating, especially getting posts from the big instances. I presume it’s a server load thing.

            • @[email protected]
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              11 year ago

              This is what I was thinking of! I’m still learning how to find things on the fediverse, did you use one of the search engines?

              • Teppic
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                21 year ago

                If you figure out a good way let me know! I knew I’d seen this post but to find it again … well, I used Google to find a discussion on codeburg, and that had a link back to kbin!

            • @[email protected]
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              61 year ago

              Kbin is another open source link aggregation program with a different developer that uses the same protocol as Lemmy (ActivityPub), so kbin and Lemmy instances can communicate with each other. If you see anyone with “@kbin.social” after their name then that’s where they’re from. You can check it out yourself here as well kbin.social

        • @[email protected]
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          101 year ago

          It’s apparently because it’s Twitter based and Twitter shows likes and such. Kbin doesn’t really have a like upvote downvotes thing. It’s like a favorite and a boost. It’s weird

          • VerifiablyMrWonka
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            131 year ago

            Not true.

            Both Lemmy and KBin map the same activitypub activities to the same upvote and downvote actions.

            • JohnEdwa
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              1 year ago

              Currently yes, but before they started federating they didn’t. That’s why Kbin has both Boost (retweet), and the Favourite (like) is the “upvote”, which end up here https://kbin.social/fav - and until very recently, those didn’t increase your reputation.

              Kbin is (was) less like Reddit and more like Twitter with downvotes.

          • czech
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            51 year ago

            Kbin has normal upvote/downvotes since a recent update.

        • MuddybulldogOP
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          51 year ago

          That’s a pretty reasonable hypothesis. I wouldn’t imagine the motivator was to deliberately create conflict.

    • sab
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      241 year ago

      One thing I really like is that it makes it easy to identify users to block. If there’s a post stating that “Nazis are bad” and it has ten downvotes, it’s very easy to use that to block future content from trolls and people I’m not interested in hearing from.

      • deweydecibel
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        1 year ago

        Yeah, and guess what? They can do that to you.

        Effectively, every single person can use a bot that will automate the blocking of any user that ever downvotes them ever.

        Like if I made a post that says I like Nazis, and then waited for the downvotes to pour in. Add every single one of those names to a block list, share that block list with all of my alts and all of my friends, and suddenly you have a whole army of Nazi sympathizers that are invisible to the users that would downvote them.

        These hand waving excuses about votes being public are really lacking imagination. This is extremely abusable information, and cursory tools can will be put together to make abusing them simple.

        • sab
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          21 year ago

          I think there are some problems about voting being public. I don’t think this is one of them.

          I don’t mind people blocking me, and if I don’t appreciate the type of content people provide I’ll block them liberally. It’s not necessarily anything personal, I’m just cirating my experience.

          Furthermore, I strive to be on instances where nazi sympathisers would be banned, and where instances tolerating them would be defederated. The only issue is identifying and weeding out troll accounts.

          • @[email protected]
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            61 year ago

            You wouldn’t know that your instance is infested with tankies and fascists. You can’t see their posts because you’re on the block list.

      • newIdentity
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        61 year ago

        Depends on where it’s posted in. Also this example is pretty low effort. I would downvote it too