imaqtpie

Lol. Nice one, I never heard that line before.

I was going to edit my previous comment but I'll just put it here.

I understand your point, but I'm saying that private/public is not a binary concept. It's a spectrum, and making votes visible on the Lemmy UI shifts the position much closer to the public side. It will have a noticeable effect on people's behavior.

But I agree that it's probably possible to correlate the voting profiles in theory. Could potentially be prevented by randomizing the profile for each vote maybe.

You should check out the PieFed concept that I linked. That seems to provide a layer of privacy managed by the local instance admin. I'm curious if you can see any obvious way it might be bypassed or exploited, because I know you have a greater technical acumen than myself.

I just had to type in the URL for your comment in the search bar and click the “Activity” field in the menu.

Believe it or not, that barrier of entry is enough to dissuade 99% of people. People simply don't have the time or inclination to do this. But if you put a button right in the Lemmy UI, people will check constantly, and it will cause arguments and potentially defederations.

It's not illegal to get your DNA, which is arguably the most egregious example I gave. They solve cold cases all the time nowadays by surreptitiously collecting DNA samples. You can see how heavy someone is just by looking at them. But that doesn't mean they want to tell you their actual weight. I'm not sure about income and age, and it would vary by jurisdiction anyhow.

I'm just trying to explain that healthy social interactions and environments are predicated on some degree of privacy, and abolishing that serves no one. If you remove the privacy of voting, you reduce the incentive for people to vote, or indeed to use this platform at all.

I'm well aware that they can be viewed from other platforms and by admins. But I don't agree that this makes them effectively public.

By that logic, everything is effectively public. Why should I be reluctant to share my age, weight, income, DNA? All of that information can be publicly available for someone who takes the time to sample a piece of my hair, check my birth certificate, etc. It's not illegal or impossible for someone to obtain that information.

But there's a whole world of difference between something being theoretically accessible via workarounds, and being displayed prominently for all to see. As a result of human nature, I think that allowing people to easily check votes on any post would cause a great deal of conflict.

Also, there are currently plans underway to build more privacy into the fediverse.

Cool solution. It's great to have multiple projects in the fediverse that can experiment with different features/formats.

For those who are concerned about possible downsides, I think it's important to understand that

• PieFed has a small userbase
• Rimu is an active admin, so if you are attempting to combat brigading or other bad behavior and this makes it more difficult, just send them a DM and they will be happy to help out

This is a good environment to test this feature because Rimu can keep a close watch over everything. We can't become paralyzed by the hypothetical ways that bad actors might abuse new features or systems. The only way forward is through trial and error, and the fact that PieFed exists makes that process significantly faster and less disruptive.

This is an attempt to add more privacy to the fediverse. If the consequences turn out for the worse, then we can either try something else, or live with the lack of privacy. Either way, we'll be better off than having never tried anything at all.

This would be a catastrophic mistake. Please don't.

Ok I didn't realize you were just a troll. Good luck with that.

If this is your definition of “objective”, something you can say about the books in the Bible, sure bro I guess.

Seriously? What a ridiculous, intellectually dishonest false equivalency. Why not respond to the remainder of my argument? Do you actually doubt whether the Ancient Greeks existed?

To me objective means it can be empirically proven: 2+2=4. Earth is the third planet from the Sun. Water at sea level boils at 100c. Etc.

Pure empiricism is pure nonsense. Objective truths exist independently of individual minds, while subjective truths exist within minds.

History is composed of a series of events that physically occurred on Planet Earth within the past ~5k years, and were recorded in written form by human beings. Human beings were born, did certain things, wrote them down, and died. We can dig up their remains and verify many of the things they wrote via empirical, scientific methodologies. You can choose to doubt various interpretations of the facts, but your delusions cannot change the inherent reality that lies within.

Your choice to contest the validity of history is demonstrative of a profoundly irrational mindset, because you are rejecting verifiable information in favor of your own subjective assumptions. You would prefer that history not be objective, because you wish to believe your own subjective version of history as an emotional coping mechanism.

So embarrassing.

There is nothing “objective” about History, it is an educated guess.

A lack of absolute certainty does not equate to a lack of objectivity. You're right that history is necessarily written by individuals who have biases. But it is also written by many individuals from different perspectives and correlated with a variety of other sources of knowledge, such as archeology, geology, etc.

For another example think about what the Greeks wrote about the Persians during their many wars, and vice versa. They are conflicrive accounts. Both biased and political. So again, what history is correct, objective?

They are conflicting on some things, but they also agree on many things. For instance, I'm sure we can agree that the Greeks and Persians existed, controlled large empires, fought wars against each other, etc. Historians are trained to analyze all of the documents available from all perspectives and arrive at the most objective conclusion that they can muster.

I strongly oppose the postmodern attitude that everything is subjective. It's good to remember the limits of our knowledge, but to completely discard an academic field such as history as entirely subjective is quite absurd.

Yeah, that's right. I didn't realize that when I made this comment. Feddit.org is the replacement instance because of all the issues with feddit.de