I wonder if there’s a way to prevent people from even knowing that two different votes came from the same user.

What I outlined above should prevent anyone from knowing two different votes came from the same user… without specifically trying that user’s id on each. That’s what the salt (the comment/post id) is for.

I’ve personally been banned from one community for downvoting too consistently.

Votes should be anonymous.

I tend to agree, but the fact is that they aren’t anonymous. This tool just exposes the already-existing fact that Lemmy expressly does not guarantee anonymity for votes. The solution isn’t to not for the poster to not publish this tool. Believe me, such tools already exist in private even if none other than this one are published. Publishing this one only democratizes access to that information. (And not entirely, I don’t think. From what I’m seeing on the page, it looks like it still requires an admin account on an instance. Update: Actually, I’m not sure if it requires an admin account or not. Either way, though.) The solution is (if it’s possible) to make Lemmy itself protect voters’ anonymity.

The reason why instances know who has up/down voted things (rather than only keeping an anonymized “total” for each post/comment) is so it can prevent double-voting.

Maybe instead of usernames, the instances could store/trade… salted hashes of the usernames where the salt is the title or unique identifier of the post/comment being voted on? It wouldn’t be perfect, but it would allow the instance to figure out whether the currently-viewing or currently-voting user has already voted while also making it harder for anyone else to get that information. About the only way a tool could tell you exhaustively who had voted if that were how things worked that I can think of off hand is to try every username on Lemmy one-by-one until all the votes were accounted for.

(Of course, malicious instances could still keep track of usernames or unique user ids who up/downvoted, but only on the instance on which the vote was cast. Also, one downside of this approach would be increased CPU usage. How much? Not sure. It might be trivial. Or maybe not. Dunno.)

And there may be much better ways to do this. I haven’t really thought about it much. I also haven’t checked whether there is an open ticket asking for improved anonymity for votes already.

(Also, full disclosure, all of the above was written after only an extremely brief skim of the linked page.)

(One more edit. Something IHawkMike said led me to realize that the scheme I described above would allow instances to manipulate votes by just inventing hashes. Like, grabbing 512 bits of data from /dev/urandom and giving it to other instances as if it was a hash of a username or user id when, in fact, it’s not a hash of anything. Other instances wouldn’t be able to easily tell that it wasn’t the hash of a valid user id. I haven’t thought how to go about solving that yet. Maybe if it occurs to me, I’ll update this post.)

Congratulations, Google, you can spy on math now.

5318008

Clear.

5318008

Clear.

5318008

etc

Shun the extravert. SHUN!

Seriously, though, I guess it depends on the question. If it’s something nuanced and interesting to me that I have an opinion on, I’m likely to launch into an impromptu TED talk and monologue at you until I lose track of time. (God help you if you get me started on whether she exists or not.) If it’s something simple like what species of bird that is, you’ll get probably the minimum number of words necessary to convey an accurate answer (or “I don’t know”).

I hate conversation just for conversation’s sake, though. There has to be a point to it. And the point can’t just be “conversation.” What you’re talking about feels too much like “small talk” for my taste.

But also, it takes all kinds. You’re not bad or invalid for liking small talk. Just… not necessarily my taste. Heh. Go find some other extraverts.

Also, I don’t think your opinion is terribly unpopular at least in more western, individualist cultures.

Jean-Luc Picard is entirely too classy to snore.

Yeah, it’s like prosecuting women for miscarriages. Oh wait.

Last time I made a post on Reddit, the automod hid and locked my post for advocating something my post wasn’t advocating and then responded to my post saying my post was a duplicate, which it was not. The automod also DM’d me to tell me I would be banned shortly if I didn’t take action quickly. I messaged a(n ostensibly) flesh-and-blood mod who agreed with me and unlocked/unhid my post, but by that point, the post was old enough that it wouldn’t get any significant amount of responses.

I’m not necessarily entirely against automods, but if we do end up with automods, they definitely need to be more judicious than the ones on Reddit. (And they are, from what I’ve seen. I don’t think I’ve ever seen that an automod on Lemmy has done something and thought “that automod is out of line.”

Maybe just as a rule of thumb, I’m thinking maybe automods shouldn’t delete/lock/hide posts. The whole automatically responding saying “your post is a duplicate” is pretty infantalizing as well. But I could certainly see use in an automod that flags any posts for review that mention such-and-such keywords.

And maybe I could even be convinced that automods actually deleting/locking/hiding posts (or even banning users) could be a good thing in some cases as long as they err on the side of false negatives rather than false positives.

Anyway, I guess all that to say that I’m broadly sympathetic to having concerns about automods. Though “it’s lazy” isn’t really my objection to them. And I don’t think talking smack about mods is exactly good PR for your opinion. (The communities I mod are all pretty chill and modding really doesn’t take up any significant amount of my time, but I’m all for making mods’ jobs easier.)

I think you’re misunderstanding octopus_ink’s comment. Are you thinking octopus_ink is a 4chan refugee? I think they’re just a Lemmy user hoping we don’t get flooded with 4chan assholes.

4chan and Jira too. It does seem like a lot of things have had outages lately.

I really can’t overstate how much respect I have for Kuhn and the SFC. If RMS and the FSF are the Free Software movement’s past, Kuhn and the SFC are it’s future, and I can’t imagine anyone better to carry that particular torch.

Why wasn’t I told that was an option sooner?

I hate agreeing with a CEO.

Fwizzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

But the title of the article is “Did ‘The Simpsons’ Predict President Trump’s Death”. And it’s rated “false”. If The Simpsons did predict his death, just not as indicated by the specific image mentioned in the article, surely that would be mentioned and the overall rating would be something like “mixture” rather than “false”.

I suppose unless The Simpsons predicted his death in an episode released after that Snopes article was written. In which case, fair point.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=di7dZwidXZU

Yes, this is a shitpost community, but I still feel obligated to make sure folks know this isn’t real.

Couldn’t agree more.

To be fair, I wouldn’t be surprised if, had they not removed the ticker, they’d gotten complaints about anti-Trump bias.

Not saying they were justified, but at this point, their viewers are as radical as they are.

It was Zero Cool. Definitely Zero Cool.