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Welcome to Codidact Meta!

Codidact Meta is the meta-discussion site for the Codidact community network and the Codidact software. Whether you have bug reports or feature requests, support questions or rule discussions that touch the whole network – this is the site for you.

Comments on General discussion on making votes public

Post

General discussion on making votes public

+7
−1

Make vote secrecy a per-community choice, because some communities might prefer voting transparency over voting privacy.

Side-question. Why voting is secret in other Q&A platforms?

Origins in the Community Server (direct link to conversation), raw transcript follows (but expect format inconsistencies):

Transcript

Mithical
Votes are anonymous. Scrounging vote stats on profile pages to see who's cast votes on a small site to try to figure out who's downvoted something is highly discouraged, and calling people out for it is definitely over the line.

DonielF
Why are vote stats displayed on profiles?

Mithical
uploads a pic of Shrek captioned "good question"

gs
let's read the git log about it
I traced it back to the earliest user profile pages written back 5 years ago
I couldn't identify a reason, I'd guess "just because it was easily and readily available" the first living version already had that https://github.com/codidact/qpixel/commit/90a8cb1683cc90ad8bd928742c3a32d5ee761d64

cellio
When Art wrote QPixel originally he was probably thinking more along the lines of an SE clone as opposed to a new thing. Originally Codidact was going to start fresh with all new code, building from the start what we wanted to have, but that turned out to have issues. So we decided to start with QPixel and evolve it into what we want. This is one of those underlying assumptions, inherited from SE, that I'm guessing no one thought about. I think it makes sense to show voting history only to the user, not publicly.

gs
what if we went all the way around. Instead of making everything vote-secret, make everything vote-public
excuse me I ignore if there's already a meta post about it

DonielF

what if we went all the way around. Instead of making everything vote-secret, make everything vote-public

@gs NONONONONONONO

gs
why not? I mean

DonielF
Already with reactions and “me too”‘s we’ve had people say they’re only interested in voting and the like only because of anonymity involved; they don’t want it to be personal.

gs
if voting is even moar secret than in SE, there'll always be people thinking staff cheats scores

DonielF
As if scores do anything?
Also, everything is open source
There’s no way for staff to cheat votes

ShowMeBillyJo
Well, direct database manipulation - the data isn't open source

gs

Already with reactions and “me too”‘s we’ve had people say they’re only interested in voting and the like only because of anonymity involved; they don’t want it to be personal.

aha so r you basically saying it's a community choice?
and I mean a per community choice

ShowMeBillyJo
I think it'd be an interesting thought exercise to explore fully open votes, even if it doesn't get implemented

DonielF

aha so r you basically saying it’s a community choice?

@gs I’m not necessarily saying that, but I’d be comfortable with such a policy.
Look, if y’all really think this is something that should be explored, Meta awaits

gs
I'm lazy to write the post but give me a link I can upvote

Mithical
There are also some ancient forum discussions about this.

[...]

Mithical

There are also some ancient forum discussions about this

https://forum.codidact.org/t/proposal-votes-scores-and-answer-order/385/19

Relevant forum discussion: https://forum.codidact.org/t/proposal-votes-scores-and-answer-order/385/19

discussion voting
posted over 3 years ago
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3y ago by Moshi‭
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1 comment thread

General comments (11 comments)
General comments
Zerotime‭ wrote over 3 years ago
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Can you upload a screenshot of the relevant conversation or transcribe it? I don't want to register for Discord.

Olin Lathrop‭ wrote over 3 years ago · edited over 3 years ago
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I couldn't get to the linked post on Discord. I thought I had an account there, but after making me go thru captchas, it would then tell me it didn't like my email address. When I tried to create a new account, it wouldn't proceed until I gave it my birth date. What the …!? I don't see a legitimate reason for it needing to know that. No thanks.

Moshi‭ wrote over 3 years ago
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@Olin Lathrop It's for the same reason other sites require it, as a platform they are required to restrict usage of it for those underage.

Olin Lathrop‭ wrote over 3 years ago
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@Moshi: Then they could just ask if I'm over 18, or whatever the relevant age threshold is.

Lundin‭ wrote over 3 years ago · edited over 3 years ago
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Discord has always been a nasty piece of spyware. Never understood why it got so popular. And no, I won't use it either, it tracks pretty much everything possible to track.

Moshi‭ wrote over 3 years ago
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@Lundin That site also lists Mozilla Firefox, Unity and Steam as having High levels of spyware, and Mozilla Thunderbird as medium spyware; even Paint.NET is apparently spyware. I highly doubt the accuracy of that site.

Their reasoning for those labels is also utterly inane. Discord is spyware because... they use their servers to relay your messages? Because you need to provide an email address for an account? How do they think a chat/social media service works?

Moshi‭ wrote over 3 years ago · edited over 3 years ago
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Imagine that level of paranoia was applied to Codidact (no offence to Codidact). It would fail miserably because it requires users to provide an email address, stores all of the user's posts and comments on private Codidact databases, and runs an analytics script in the user's browser.

Moshi‭ wrote over 3 years ago
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I'm not here to debate about security, I just don't want people getting the wrong idea about what "High levels of spyware" mean on that site. Their idea of spyware is, apparently, anything that the user doesn't have minute and direct control over, meaning every website is high level of spyware (because you don't control the server), and every online service is spyware (because you are technically giving them info just by using the service). Anyway, rant over.

.                                                .‭ wrote over 3 years ago
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we should use #codidact@freenode for being less spied

Lundin‭ wrote over 3 years ago · edited over 3 years ago
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@Moshi Eh, have you ever used Discord? It is obvious that it tracks what programs you have installed and which ones that are currently running. Then it sends that information to a server. The very definition of spyware. And yes Steam does that too, but only if you agree to participate in a "survey". They are open about it and do tell you in advance that the purpose is that they are going to register what program/hardware etc you have. Anyway, this is wildly off-topic...

Moshi‭ wrote over 3 years ago
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@Lundin yes, this is off topic. And I wasn't debating whether or not Discord was spyware either, merely commenting on how unreliable that site looked.