Sometimes people miss-tap while scrolling. Also, on kbin at least, you can who downvote things if they're on kbin. I think if you run your own instance, as an admin you can see who as well?
This is definitely something that has to be thought about in terms of UI/UX design. I recently developed a Outlook calendar-esque interface, and we've had on-and-off discussions for a couple of hours about how we best implement a way to "click" an empty spot in the calendar to create an event there.
I'm championing "we don't on mobile, but use double-click on desktop." I think I'm winning.
Admins that access the post through their instance can currently see the votes.
Someone explained it to me that a lot of the downvoting is people browsing all, then getting annoyed and downvoting when they see things they're not interested in :|
Lemmy has algorithms, it's just that they aren't designed to maximise profit.
If you have the sort type set to Hot, posts are ranked based on score (upvotes minus down votes) with a decay based on post time. Active is the same but based on the last comment time.
If you are on the website, there is a ? next to the sort option that will take you to a page explaining how the different options work.
But long story short, most sorting options are affected by down votes.
Kbin: Not anymore, at least last I checked. I have an old account there that I left behind due to the enormous amount of technical glitches it kept having, and checking in on it recently (maybe last week?), not one of my comments has even a single downvote there - even older ones. iirc the "reduces" tab was still present, just entirely empty. (I was looking for a particular comment, but then while there noticed the effect was much wider.) Edit: I took another look, and I the only downvotes I see are from kbin itself (example post), so it seems to not be federating downvotes from outside of itself.
In the past when it did used to work, it also would not show downvotes from instances that it had server-wise defederated with, although someone can still get downvotes from personally blocking an instance, on a Lemmy server running v0.19.3 or greater, that the server itself had not server-wise defederated with. So there was always a very large gap there.
The reason I thought of this all was due to the OP title: e.g. someone could mass-downvote things on the Fediverse to attempt to control the conversation by de-emphasizing things that they did not personally agree with, but outside of moderator or admin reporting that offers a degree of trust behind it. Obviously that is its intended purpose, but I mean maliciously subverting that like have 10 accounts and log into all of them to influence a post.
About once a week lately I keep blocking some spammer accounts that randomly shill products or videos throughout the Fediverse, rather than wait for an admin to do it, but if an account(s) was more subtle and merely downvoted, then I doubt such a thing would even be noticed?
I should add that I respect some people's decisions if they want to be on a server that doesn't even record or reveal downvotes - that's fine bc it's their choice. But otherwise it is basically public knowledge, except as you say you need to fire up an instance of your own to view them, and then protect that instance from intrusion efforts even if you use it for nothing else (or possibly there is some API call, but I doubt that knowledge would be so easy to find, and for one thing it would have to access a database that has sent out past updates, not merely listen for new ones unless it had been running prior to the downvote event).
Anyway, I hoped people would see this post, and it seems that is happening, so this time the downvotes did not detail any conversation about the topic (with many tens-fold greater up- than down-votes), but if there had been sufficient number of downvotes delivered quickly enough... then how many of us would have even seen this, sorting Subscribed or All by Hot? So it points to a liability in the Fediverse, which at some point, someone somewhere is going to exploit.
I know right? It sucks having a curved screen with a case as it pushes my thumb in the exact worst spot on the side of the screen. I accidentally do things all the time. I rest my thumb on the case edge to try and avoid it, but if I barely tilt, it touches the oversensitive touchscreen. First world problems.
Due to how federation works, downvotes are actually somewhat public because instance owners can query them in lemmy database, though instance owners probably won't tell you if you ask due to privacy reason. If you're interested in something like this, you can run your own instance.
Federated voting in general seems like it could use some rethinking to enable private voting but also to protect against vote manipulation. Right now the fediverse is arguably incredibly vulnerable to vote manipulation campaigns.
Open (and distributed) and private are two very difficult things to intermingle. You can mitigate some issues, but at the end of the day the two ideas have to butt against each other.
Fair point. Blockchain might be the quickest to implement just because the infrastructure is already established, even if it's not trivial. Not sure, though.
Openly distributed while being private(-ish; I know blockchains aren't truly private but it could at least obfuscate it adequately against casual or semi serious attempts to identify someone)
I'll admit I'm no expert or even particularly well versed in blockchain technologies, but my (limited) understanding of them suggests this might actually be the kind of thing it's good at (as opposed to how it could seemingly do anything a few years ago and everyone was trying to shoehorn a blockchain into their products)
And to underline part of my comment, I did say "I wonder if..." rather than asserting that it would work or even that I bet it would work
Fedi technologies are already distributed. That's literally what federation is about.
Blockchain isn't private by default although some have gone that direction. Bitcoin, for example, is pseudonymous - all transactions are public to the world though no tx is tied to an identity on chain.
Any privacy features you're imagining can be built for a blockchain solution to this problem could be built into a "normal", web 2.0, federated solution that would be far less expensive to run, resource-wise.
It's almost always the case that when someone comes up with blockchain as the solution to some problem, they mean distributed or maybe self-hosted. Neither of which requires a blockchain.
I was wondering about this. If they didn't keep track of who is voting, manipulation would be easier then it already is. The problem is that rogue instance admins could make votes public.