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.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P55t6eryY3g

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

I joined when it was for students only and quit sometime around 2007. There was a “quit Facebook day” once a year that was for raising awareness about how evil Facebook was even back then. I quit on one of those days. At least that’s part of the reason why I quit. Also the only Facebook friend I really interacted with abruptly got extremely fundamentalist Christian and started posting stuff that I couldn’t stand to be assaulted with.

My place of work used to have a fairly large “data entry” department until they… did… something to make that job kindof unnecessary. They laid off pretty much all of that department. And I’m told the boss who was over them before they were laid off returned to his office to find a sizeable human shit directly atop his desk.

Another story. My own boss (actually my boss’s boss) was a massive asshole. Committed the team to a completely unreasonable deadline in conversations with the C-level folks above him, and then threw temper tantrums when the deadline wasn’t hit. He turned the daily standup into a 7:30am (in-person) daily demo to prove we were making progress and weren’t… I dunno… slacking off or whatever. Many a temper tantrum was had in those demos as well.

I quit and made no secret of why. After I left, I heard through the grapevine that in a meeting with the CTO, the asshole boss accused the CTO of being incompetent and said that he was gunning for the CTO’s job. The CTO, sensibly, told the asshole boss to do not pass go, do not collect $200, security will escort you out of the building and we’ll ship you your personal effects from your office.

And then I quit the place I’d gone to and went back to where the asshole boss had been and I’m still working there. Definitely would not have considered coming back if he was still there.

Ok. One more story about the other place. They switched from one chat provider to another. But they never actually shut down the one they were migrating away from. Several folks never left the old chat. When it was discovered that on the old chat service, said folks were trading really really inappropriate holocaust jokes, the whole office got a talking to in very vague terms. It wasn’t until like a month later that someone explained to me what had precipitated that.

Long COVID and fascism.

Right?

I remember the local contemporary Christian station would sometimes play P.O.D., but only late at night. It was too “hard” or something for during the day when I guess kids might be listening or whatever. The DJ even chastised listeners once for requesting P.O.D. during the day.

You just described my teens. Also Jars of Clay (I went to one of their concerts once), The News Boys, and some more obscure ones like Pillar and Paul Ruben. I also loved P.O.D… It’s really weird to hear them on secular radio these days.

Now-a-days, all of that is only for when I’m wallowing in self pity. There have been times in my life when casually mentioning a secular song around my family would make the shit hit the fan.

Same. I was the first person in my immediate family to vote for a Democrat. They were appalled I’d vote for gays. (They’d have used a different term than “gays”, but I digress.)

/thread

If Satan walked into the room you’re currently in right now and said “I’m here to collect your soul to torture for eternity as payment for the bigger dick I gave your great great great grandfather on this date in 1925 unless you can make me laugh in the next 30 seconds”, what would you do?

I turn off autocorrect on anything that offers it. Mostly my android phone, but also on LibreOffice or whatever.

I also turn off all auto-capitalize, auto-punctuation, etc. When coding, I also hate auto-indent. If I want something indented, I’ll hit tab.

In short, when I put in text, I want my computing devices to get exactly what I explicitly input and nothing else.

I also took out the fuse that powers the Starlink connectivity in my Subaru because Subaru’s privacy policy says they’ll record any audio in the cabin they damned well please with no notice or consent (except insofar as existing in the cabin constitutes “consent” because their legal department says so) and send those recordings back to the mothership to use in any way they see fit.

Your post isn’t asking a question, it’s pushing an agenda. Really doesn’t seem in the spirit of this community to me.

I’ll take FOSS over the proprietary software we can be sure will do malicious things to us any day.

The only thing worse than reading documentation/tutorials about how to do things in GUIs is writing documentation about how to do things in GUIs. It’s just screenshot after screenshot. And following it is like playing a ScummVM game, only less fun and lots more alt+tabbing.

How old is your phone and have you been updating it? Maybe your phone is so old that the certificates on it are too old to recognize the current Discord certificate?

That’s awesome! Welcome to the club and don’t be afraid to explore your system and ask questions!

Nope.

Every cult has as one of its core tenets that only evil, terrible people wouldn’t want to be part of it.

The U.S. is currently being run by a cult.

Not everyone in the U.S. is part of that cult. But a damned lot of the population of the U.S. is.

Source: Am american.