i’ve seen quite a few users with one downvote on every single comment for no reason and it makes me wonder if people are disagreeing, stalking users, or just a weird bot account.

    • vaguerant
      25•1 month ago

      Now, this is interesting. As far as I know, all of the public threadiverse softwares specifically hide this info (especially downvotes), while acknowledging that the way ActivityPub works, the information is public anyway and you’re really just making it slightly less accessible. An open service like this essentially removes all of the supposed barriers (e.g. “Most users don’t know how to set up their own instance in order to see downvotes.”) which are claimed to keep this info private.

      What kind of effect does knowing exactly which people downvoted you have on a platform? Is there a chilling effect on downvotes, is there revenge downvoting? I guess we’ll find out. It’s less easy to see the upsides of knowing this info, beyond being able to confirm whether or not you’re being stalked by persistent downvoters.

      @lena@gregtech.eu Did you have any particular thoughts around the ethics of this tool when you decided to make and share it? Not trying to call you out in any way, just interested to hear how you feel about it. Ultimately, if it wasn’t you it would be somebody else, so the direct impact is probably negligible.

      • LenaEnglish
        34•1 month ago

        Thanks for the question, I believe the illusion of privacy is worse than the lack of privacy. Currently, non-technical users or newbies think that their votes are private, which they are definitely not. Someone could spin up an instance and see the votes, which users cast without thinking about how private they really are.

        I will also write a blog post about this tool and its ethics.

        • vaguerant
          9•1 month ago

          Nice, I’ll look forward to reading that, thanks!

          Your point re: the illusion of privacy makes sense. Most Lemmy/other threadiverse users are probably used to platforms where that data is not public and I don’t think any of the softwares really highlight that it’s different here. It’s easy to get a false impression of privacy.

      • Pamasich
        6•1 month ago

        What kind of effect does knowing exactly which people downvoted you have on a platform? Is there a chilling effect on downvotes, is there revenge downvoting? I guess we’ll find out.

        It’s not like we haven’t had public downvoting in the fediverse yet. We already found out in the past.

        Kbin had public downvotes and the main effect was that people put more thought into their downvotes. While I assume it wasn’t without abuse, I’ve never seen it brought up as an active problem, just something that could theoretically happen.

    • @notabot@lemm.ee
      6•1 month ago

      Thanks, this is a really handy tool. Kniwing the information was being withheld ‘just because’ was really rankling me. Now, could you just add a quick feature to read their minds and tell me why they down voted me? ;)

    • AwesomeLowlander
      3•1 month ago

      Nice! Any chance you could have it filter by community? Would be useful as a mod to see who’s downvoting a lot in a comm

      • LenaEnglish
        6•1 month ago

        I will try, this is my first serious project so uhh no guarantees :P

    • LostXOR
      2•1 month ago

      It doesn’t seem to be working for me; I’ve tried several posts on different instances and they all result in a 500 error from your API.

      • LenaEnglish
        2•1 month ago

        May I have the post URLs you tried so I can troubleshoot?

        • LostXOR
          2•1 month ago

          Sure thing, these ones didn’t work:

          https://lemmy.world/post/28644011
https://programming.dev/post/18300668
https://programming.dev/post/29141568
https://lemmy.zip/post/37110005
https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/25001000

          Also found some that worked while testing some more:

          https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/24792249
https://programming.dev/post/29139521
          • LenaEnglish
            3•1 month ago

            They didn’t work because they’re not from the poster/commenter’s instance. As it says on votes.gregtech.eu, currently the URL has to be from the poster’s instance. I am working on a better way to do this.

            • LostXOR
              2•1 month ago

              Ah okay, I interpreted that as the link having to be from the post’s instance. Nevermind then I guess.

              • LenaEnglish
                3•29 days ago

                Aaaand I fixed it. The URL can be from any instance now!

          • Maeve
            2•1 month ago

            I’m very interested in why some posts from the same servers will fetch results on some posts and not others.

    • Maeve
      1•1 month ago

      I’ve checked several posts with one dv. Only one hasn’t worked so far, which is weird, because it stemmed from the same instance as several others. There is one user showing up from lemme.ee several from .world, and an odd other instance, here and there. I’m wondering if the one that didn’t show up was some magazine mod’s protection against it?

    • Maeve
      1•1 month ago

      Lol! Guess from which instance my comment dvs originated!