On Reddit, my karma was always weighted more on the question side than on the comment side. I felt bad for not being a valuable contributor to people’s lives rather than being selfish and always asking things for myself. Lemmy has gotten rid of that point system so now I feel like I can feel free to ask as many questions as I need without having to balance my karma. Also, I have noticed that I participate so much more on this platform than I ever did on Reddit.
As illustration of this fact, over here on kbin.social I can check this comment’s “activity” and see that the four upvotes it’s received so far are from @VieuxQueb, @kakes, @density and @Treevan. The timestamps are visible too.
This isn’t some sort of sneaky doxxing, its presented just two mouse clicks away in the standard kbin interface to anyone with an account. I wouldn’t be surprised if fancier tracking systems get implemented, maybe right in the instance or maybe with some kind of RES-style user script, to let you see patterns in who is upvoting or downvoting whom more easily.
This isn’t to say that people shouldn’t upvote and downvote freely, just keep in mind that it doesn’t work like Reddit did. This is public information here.
Also whether you automatically upvote yourself (which is visible with the others) depends on server/instance. kbin does not self upvote automatically right now.
Please tell me this only applies to kbin users and/ot there’s a way to disable it
This is a serious privacy risk
Only Kbin currently has an easy UI for accessing it, as far as I’m aware Lemmy hasn’t implemented one. But the fact that the information is available is inherent in the ActivityPub protocol that both Lemmy and Kbin are using, there is no way to “disable” it other than not actually upvoting or downvoting anything. When you upvote or downvote something that action is broadcast to all federated instances because otherwise they wouldn’t be able to see it and include it in the vote totals, and it has your username attached because all user actions have their username attached (otherwise they’d be trivial to fake).
Whether it’s a “privacy risk” is in the eye of the beholder. You just posted a comment (that I’m responding to) and it’s got your username attached to it as well. Perhaps consider upvotes and downvotes to be a special type of comment response that says “I like this” or “I don’t like this” in a way that instances can sum up and display with a numeric total.