14 votes

[SOLVED] Question about post voting locking

Posted by earlsweatshirt
Tags: ask.help, voting, solved

Hi, I was wondering if the current duration before voting gets locked on a post is still 30 days? I tried to find the answer in the docs but didn’t see it (apologies if I missed it) and all I turned up in a search of the site was a topic from 3 years ago mentioning the 30 days, so I wanted to see if that’s still accurate.

Thanks !

8 comments

  1. [2]
    Bauke
    Link
    It may also be useful to mention it's 30 days from when the individual topic or comment is posted. So once a topic is 30 days old, voting on that topic is locked. But any comments can still be...
    • Exemplary

    It may also be useful to mention it's 30 days from when the individual topic or comment is posted. So once a topic is 30 days old, voting on that topic is locked. But any comments can still be voted on as long as the comment itself isn't 30 days old yet. So if a topic from 2019 has a comment from yesterday, you can still vote on that comment for another 29 days.

    It's not like voting gets locked on everything in the topic once it reaches 30 days old.

    23 votes
    1. earlsweatshirt
      Link Parent
      Thank you for clarifying, I was trying to cover both topics and comments with « post » but I can see how it it might seem like posts is referring to the topics only.

      Thank you for clarifying, I was trying to cover both topics and comments with « post » but I can see how it it might seem like posts is referring to the topics only.

      4 votes
  2. [3]
    Amarok
    (edited )
    Link
    Worth a quick mention that the reason for this is to delete your voting histories, so that Tildes retains no data about how you vote. Other major sites live for this data and use it to build...

    Worth a quick mention that the reason for this is to delete your voting histories, so that Tildes retains no data about how you vote. Other major sites live for this data and use it to build viciously invasive profiles on you ranging from political leanings and psych profile to geolocating you for advertising. You can leak a stunning amount of privacy data to a website where you have never even made a single comment just by lurking and voting. A multi-year history of your likes and dislikes is very telling data. The digital equivalent of radioactive waste, if you care at all about privacy.

    Tildes deletes this data as soon as possible under Canadian law. That's the 30 day cutoff. That way there's nothing to sell, nothing to subpoena, and nothing for hackers to steal. Solves an awful lot of headaches this way, but you have to give up the advertising revenue to do it.

    20 votes
    1. [2]
      earlsweatshirt
      Link Parent
      Interesting to know why 30 days. Thanks !

      Interesting to know why 30 days. Thanks !

      6 votes
      1. cfabbro
        (edited )
        Link Parent
        From the man, the myth, the legend himself, from the ~tildes.official topic: The voting on topics and comments now ends when they're 30 days old and all individual vote records are deleted,...

        From the man, the myth, the legend himself, from the ~tildes.official topic:
        The voting on topics and comments now ends when they're 30 days old and all individual vote records are deleted, retaining only the count

        This is a privacy-related update that I've always intended to implement on Tildes, and I finally spent some time on it this week.

        Keeping eternal records of everything that every user ever voted on is some of the most sensitive data that sites with a voting system have. Your voting history says a huge amount about you, your interests and opinions, and can even serve as a decent proxy for showing what times you were active on the site, what posts you were reading, and how long you spent reading the comments on each of them. In exchange for these major privacy implications, you get the tiny benefit of being able to tell which old posts you voted on (if you even go back to old posts).

        So now, to match up with Tildes's general approach of deleting as much sensitive data as possible after 30 days, the voting on posts closes when they're 30 days old. After a post's voting is closed, the records of which individual users voted on that post are deleted, but the count of how many votes there were is kept. So old posts will continue showing their same "scores" exactly the same as before, but there will be no record of which individual users cast those votes.

        However, this isn't a purely positive update: the main downside is that the voting does need to be closed (otherwise there would be no way to prevent people from voting again after their first vote is deleted), which prevents the occasionally useful ability to vote on old topics or comments. Overall though, voting on older posts is extremely rare, with less than 1% of the votes on Tildes ever made on something that was over 30 days old at the time of voting.

        When the "delete old sensitive data" job runs for the first time after this update later today, 97% of the voting data in the database will be deleted. That's a massive decrease in the amount of sensitive data the site is retaining, and something that most sites would never consider doing, because of the value of that data for behavior analysis and ad-targeting.

        11 votes