Edit: obligatory explanation (thanks mods for squaring me away)…
What you see via the UI isn’t “all that exists”. Unlike Reddit, where everything is a black box, there are a lot more eyeballs who can see “under the hood”. Any instance admin, proper or rogue, gets a ton of information that users won’t normally see. The attached example demonstrates that while users will only see upvote/downvote tallies, admins can see who actually performed those actions.
Edit: To clarify, not just YOUR instance admin gets this info. This is ANY instance admin across the Fediverse.
Well, yeah, it’s put on the database.
It’s the only way to avoid double voting from the same account or to remove the reverse vote if one changes one’s mind and votes the other way.
Did you think that it was any different on Reddit and that no random employee with access to their database could run a similar SQL query with a couple of joins and end up with nicknames, e-mails and IP addresses?!
Do you know who are the Reddit employees with access to their database or a copy of it? Have you had a chance to vet them? I don’t think so.
At least here it’s a bit more transparent.
The only shocking thing in this is that anybody is shocked by it.
It is only shocking if the expectation was set that your votes are private. If you wanted to avoid linking an identifiable account with their votes then you could use a de-identified user account to track a user’s votes.
You could to perform deterministic hashing prior to persisting a vote to ensure that those looking at the database can’t go backwards to find the specific users who voted on a post. But any service that knows the salt and hashing algorithm can start with a user account and determine that user’s voting history.
This allows you to track up/down votes per user without allowing over-priviledged DBAs or malicious actors from poking around voting histories of identifiable users.
Something like Monero’s Ring Signatures might provide some inspiration for truly private upvote history without duplication.
Right. Applying any form of application-level encryption to the account IDs stored in the voting tables would prevent anyone without the secret from being able to find out who voted for what by peeking at the voting tables.
The more I think about this problem, the more solvable it seems to be.
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No, if you go to old.reddit.com/prefs/ the “make my votes public” defaulted to keeping votes hidden from other users.
Most users from Reddit that are coming here are voting while not realising that their votes are completely public to anyone that simply uses kbin to browse through any instance.
Remove voting! End this dumb mob mentality!
A better way is to store only who has voted. No need to store how they have voted.
Then people won’t be able to change their minds once they’ve voted, or even see what their previous votes were.
Yes
Unfortunately, as they mentioned it would still need to know which way they voted so one can “unvote” or change their vote.
Then either up or down votes would cease to exist, the website has to somehow differentiate between those votes to properly count them.
Cease (just trying to help)
Not being a native english speaker moment
I think it would be possible not to tie up/down votes to a particular user and still be able to allow votes, but you would probably need to disallow changing a vote (unless there are some fancy uses of cryptography I don’t know about). You could use a bit field to indicate whether or not a particular user voted on a particular post, whether up or down doesn’t matter. You could register the up/down count to the table that has the post id and not tie it to the user that voted. But then a user couldn’t change their vote because of that arrangement.
I don’t personally care how my votes are recorded, I just like databases.
Yeah now that you wrote about it and I thought about it, yeah there is a way to have both. But as you’ve said it would remove the ability to change votes, and I don’t feel like thinking further into this to solve this problem. I just don’t care that much :P