I recently learned that voting on lemmy is not anonymous. Anyone can get information about who has upvoted and downvoted a post or comment.

In combination with your IP, this is a massive privacy (maybe even physical security) risk. Also, people can target you for your votes.

Sadly, this is something where I would prefer Reddit over Lemmy. Big tech scrapes data from both places anyways, at least Reddit is safe.

  • npdean@lemmy.todayOP
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    2 days ago

    Both of them are but when a person comments, they willingly put out their opinion in the public. Voting is meant to be anonymous (like irl).

    Also, votes have a massive amount as compared to comments. An average user might comment on 1 post for every 50 they vote on (a number I pulled out of my ass)

    • dan@upvote.au
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      2 days ago

      Voting is meant to be anonymous (like irl).

      Says who? Voting/likes are public on a lot of social media sites, as long as the content itself is public. The only mainstream ones I can think of where it’s not are YouTube and reddit.

      • npdean@lemmy.todayOP
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        1 day ago

        The thing is they make it extremely clear that votes are public by letting you see who voted right next to the button.

        Lemmy hides this feature and most users don’t know about it.

    • FelixCress@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      person comments, they willingly put out their opinion in the public.

      Yes.

      Voting is meant to be anonymous

      No.

    • Saleh@feddit.org
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      2 days ago

      That is not true. Most votes irl are in fact public to the audience. Did you ever participate in a democratically organized group? Local council votes are usually done by raising hands. Votes in HOA meetings are usually done by raising hands. Your sports club deciding on a new executive and treasurer? Guess what. Raising hands.

    • 9point6@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      On most social media the voting is public, see Facebook/Twitter likes. Hell back in the days of forums you could usually see the list of users that liked a given thread in most of the forum software I ever used. Reddit was the anomaly really

      I think piefed has a feature where your votes never leave your instance, so are not exposed in this way (but obviously only appear on your home instance too)

      Agree that it should be clearer to people coming from Reddit that that’s how it works though.

      • npdean@lemmy.todayOP
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        1 day ago

        The thing is they make it extremely clear that votes are public by letting you see who voted right next to the button.

        Lemmy hides this feature and most users don’t know about it.