I am kind of afraid that if voting becomes more public than it already is, it will lead exactly to more of the kind of "zero-content downvote" accounts mentioned in the ticket. Because some people are just wildly irrational when it comes to touchy subjects, and aint nobody got time to spend an eternity with them dismantling their beliefs so they understand the nuance you see that they don't (If they even let you). So it kind of incentivizes people to create an account like that to ensure a crazy person doesn't latch on to the account you're trying to have normal discussions with.

But I understand that they can technically already do this if they wanted to. So perhaps it will be fine as long as we fight against vote viewing being weaponized as a community.

This is an interesting conundrum.
On one hand it would help locate foreign agent bots/bad faith actors faster and recognize vote manipulation by bot farms.
On the other it will lead to even more account-stalking problems, user drama, and would further enable vote dogpiling if you see certain known users voted a certain way.

I'm inclined to say no. They are already "public" if one wants to put in the effort to admin a standalone instance or run alts on multiple services they can see if they care- I personally don't really care

Guarentee you will start witch hunts by making the votes more accessible. But if you want every user to be able to do that then go ahead. My ability to keep myself occupied here is already not that large, maybe some witch hunts are what we need to drive engagement up /s

Make it optional and opt-in.

I say yes!!

I have a particular set of people that actually follow me from community to community, just to downvote what I say and the articles I post. All because I posted a neutral article about the Green Party to the c/politics sub. That made them mad enough to be obsessed about me. lol

So if you are determined enough to do that, then ya shouldn't be upset that people can see what you're doing.

it should be a setting per instance to hide/show all, some or none

I'm down for more transparency. Lets make them public!

Maybe make it possible for a server to only share aggregate votes on a given post?

Like a proxy vote, where only the server knows who it belonged too.

I could go either way, but I don't think "other platforms have public voting" doesn't seem all that convincing. Who cares? I don't care who voted on what, and I doubt most others do either.

While there are workarounds, leaving it as is at least weeds out the majority of trolls who aren't technically inclined enough to go pull up A to see how B voted on C.

They simply want to police it better to suit their agenda

This is a copy and past from my reply another community, sorry if you are reading it again:

I’m at the completely opposite end of the spectrum of most people, they should be public to all. It makes it clear whether the guy downvoting you is doing so maliciously or as a non-participant. Same for upvotes. Otherwise, just get rid of it and find some better mechanism. The people saying “NO!” or that they should be anonymous don’t really have a reason, your comment history is already giving you away and no one has a problem with that.

The worst thing public upvotes/downvotes might lead to are the same things your comments are already profiled for by the same people that would and perhaps a random getting mad at your downvote or upvote and voting back, which doesn’t matter that much with the current karma system. The benefits, however, are a clear vision of where those upvotes and downvotes are coming from, without it you are a blind person in a social networks but with it you can tell who is interacting with you and you can investigate why and even make judgement calls because you can see whether they interact like a jerk.

No drama witch hunts, accountability for the way you are interacting online, the the benefits outweighs the drawbacks, but people don’t want it because they feel insecure about it. I specially favor it because it could be a first step for a form of crowdsourced moderation (speculated on it here), where you can choose the people you think are voting comments to your taste to eventually have a select group large enough to determine which should show up first and which shouldn’t show at all, and it could be completely complementary to existing systems. Don’t want to see “yes, I agree” comments sorting as the most relevant? You might choose people who do not upvote but have engaged with the rest of the thread for comments you consider more informative.

No one from kbin/mbin instances can check out the downvotes you make, since this attitude has been so widespread many don’t report it to those instances. They can see people who upvote, and the sky hasn’t fallen because of it. Anonymity largely only helps the minority making the drama remain hidden.

absolutely a horrible idea. please for the love of god don't do this, it will only lead to people getting dunked on for how they upvote/downvote.

While I don't necessarily think that votes should be made public, it would be nice if you could see your own votes. There have been a few times I wanted to find a post that I had seen, but didn't save, and I couldn't find it.

I was of the assumption they were private. Please make them private then because I want no one looking at my votes

Nah I’ll fuck off.

You know what this feature is really useful for? Seeing who upvotes spammers to preemptively block them. Admittedly, I haven't had much of a use for that aspect since kbin.social died, but it was neat while it lasted.