Considering making votes public, not considering making mod actions inform the user they occur.

I can see where their priorities are.

Making votes something mods can see is one thing but public is whole other can of worms.

Edit: Spleling

likes and votes should be anonymous and user names should only be displayed for comments.

Idk if I trust that some powermod won't send me to hell if I vote against something they strongly believe in, akwardtheturtle style

This kills the Lemmy.

Nah. Votes are already visible to people using other applications than Lemmy, so let people use those if they want to see how people voted. It's fine as-is.

What's the benefit?

Like, what's the actual user experience gain from seeing someone else's votes? Is it just so the average joe can profile users, like for identifying bots or whatever? That's not rhetorical, I'm genuinely curious, as I don't see what I'd gain from this as a Lemmy user.

Bit as I see it, I really have no desire to do this. Maybe if I was a a pseudo mod on a spammy community I guess? But comments are already a decent indicator.

The fact that the devs even considered this is a bad sign, IMO. How out of touch does one have to be to think this is a good thing in any capacity?

I understand that this information is already basically public but there is a thin barrier to the average nitwit user accessing such information and going in a rampage screwing with people who have downvoted them. I'll say this, if they make it more public I think I will just simply stop voting. I will continue to use Lemmy but only as a passive user.

I think they should be public. They’re already accessible for mbin posts and anyone administrating a lemmy instance. It should be clear to all users that their votes are already not private.

Someone could make a lemmy instance just to get voting behavior and make a website with cool graphs and stuff today and the only thing that could stop them is defederation. If Lemmy gets popular, this is just an inevitability.

Imagine if a large instance decided to do that today. Imagine if lemmy.world released lemmy.world/votes. Would people defederate just for that? Remember: Mbin already displays scores and I don’t think anyone has defederated over it.

Might as well put it on the interface so everyone understands it isn’t private. Rip off the bandaid.

Gathered some thoughts here

Potential positives:

• Any admin can already review voting activity, but some people don't realize that. This change would make it less surprising
• it would make it easier for non-admin users to study voting activity and find abuse
• it would make it consistent with other platforms that we federate with, which can already see votes

Potential downsides:

• People will report voting activity that they don't like, even if it's not malicious.

  • Admins will need to set up rules on what activity they will act on (and also take action against people that spam bad reports).
  • It would also help to have automated tools to review voting activity since it's hard to do that manually.

• It's another option for abuse, similar to bringing up past comment history

Both could be dealt with but it would make moderation somewhat harder

Likely bad:

• Mods and admins can ban people for upvoting content in communities they aren't in charge of. This might work on a small scale, but I'd caution against it because it often misses nuance:
  • it's very easy to accidentally vote on something while scrolling (unless there is a consistent pattern)
  • even if the community is seen as "bad", the post might be good (ex. it could be calling out the community)

Bad

• it lowers the barrier for other types of abuse, such as tracking vote activity for advertising, approximating when a user is asleep, etc

This is one of the downfalls of a distributed system. You basically need public votes. Without it, instances lack critical information about the validity of votes. You don’t have a centralized system with back door access to monitor and maintain things.

No.

One of the things I liked back in Kbin was being able to see who upvoted. Some people were lurkers who didn't comment, but it was still nice to always see them take an interest in the material. Felt more like they were a regular in the community.

Yes. The act of voting a comment up or down shouldn't be much different to hitting reply to that comment.

Upvote/downvote systems do exist to overcome those "+1" "-1" posts on old forums. You are not voting for the legislative elections. You are just interacting with another person comment/post in a way that does not require writing. If post comments, are not anonymous, upvotes/downvotes shouldn't be anonymous as well.

I don't see how that's much different from making a comment, it's not election, how is voting on a comment/post different from voicing your opnion with a comment?

Do I prefer the completely private option? Yes, but if the alternative is that some people can see and others can't, I prefer that everyone can see it.