Votes should absolutely be public. They were on KBin, and it made people more civil for it because you could be shamed if you were dislike trolling or liking all of your own posts/comments to make them look better (which is something you actively have to do on here, unlike Reddit).

Given this place is pseudo-anonymous anyways, and people comment far more personal and identifiable info here anyways (which tbf you should be careful about), I think public votes would do much more good than harm.

I've been thinking about this for several hours since I first became aware of the debate.

I don't care that much in theory if anyone sees my votes. They aren't anything I'm particularly private about. I care about conversation way more than up/down votes.

However, some people get a little upset about being downvoted. I think it will result in retaliatory downvotes. You already see that when two folks are arguing. I don't normally waste my time downvoting a post I'm writing a rebuttal to, but when they are downvoting me I tend to do it back. I think if everyone had easy access, they would hunt down their down voters posts and retaliate regardless of the quality of the comments.

Lastly, I wonder if this will give rise to a client that lets you use one account to post/comment and a different one to vote. And if it does, will that be better all around? Then no one will be able to associate votes with a user. But it seems unnecessarily wasteful to create a whole account that does nothing but vote. It seems like it would deny mods (and everyone) a useful tool for identifying bad actors.

Technically, anyone could get access to the voters identity if they try hard enough but 99% of the users won't put in that much effort. And technically someone could already use different accounts for different activities, but without reason to create a client to support that it's too much of a pain to be worth the effort.

So I really think I'm on team status quo here.

Overall my opinion is irrelevant, however, I think there is a huge difference in knowing a person votes vs how a person votes. The how should not be public, imo.

One benefit to vote transparency for admins is mod monitoring options.

Reddit is infested with vote manipulation via bots. At least on the Fediverse it seems like both admins and mods might have more options.

I typically operate under the assumption that basically anything I decide to post on a public forum is not private.

Call me crazy, but I care less about the instance admins being able to see my vote history than regular users. For me the latter will produce a chilling effect on how I operate with the site moreso than the former, even if admins have more power that can be abused. I was already aware of the votes not actually being public and the idea admins could see that info seemed to be a given, but I still think there's a difference between having a motivated malicious user go out of their way to look (making an instance, looking on a different platform, etc) vs making it simple for lay users to see that info within the platform itself (which I what I think is under discussion, currently).

And honestly, if a solution could be determined to help make votes anonymous but still allow admins/mods to deal with bots/trolls, then I'd be all for it.

How do mods see them? As far as I am aware, you have to be an instance admin. But it's not difficult or time consuming to spin one up and I doubt the average user of Lemmy is technically incapable; most of the Fediverse users in general seem to be IT people and developers.

Yes, they should ideally. But it's hard to properly implement them in a way that will guarantee anonymity and be sybil-resistant at the same time.

The only fair way to handle this is for all admins to immediately turn over all passwords to the Crumbgrabber, who will act as an interface between the government and private sector interests in determining the value of each Lemmy user, and whether they are a fit candidate for the mobile infantry. Remember- only service guarantees citizenship.

If votes became truly public, what would stop a malicious user from automating crawling the fediverse to get a list of every up and down vote a targeted user has ever made? Admins can currently do this, I assume given enough time and intent? Yuck.

I really hope a solution is found and if Lemmy goes the way of truly public votes, it would probably turn this into a nonparticipatory medium for me, I'd still read posts but not vote or comment.

Edit: also, most casual Lemmy users aren't aware of public votes and would be upset that it already works this way, and only particularly invested or curious users are even reading this thread.

Other posts have already posted it better than I could, but my tl;dr is: one of the good things about Lemmy compared to the "competition" is that votes are public -- or at least the fact that someone voted is.

I wouldn't mind restricting access to how a user voted, in particular if in the future something like multi-choice upvotes becomes a thing, or even something I'd love to see as is dual-voting ("I downvoted because I don't like it but I upvoted it because you are absolutely right about it", this is absolutely different than not voting at all if the who is voting is being tracked).

But on a fundamental level, in the least instance admins have to be able to know who votes for our version of the system to even work compared to the competition.

I’d rather keep the status quo. While I realize that the vote visibility can play into the hands of mod/admin/instance owners with nefarious or petty vengeful purposes, we also can see who bad actors are in the vote system - iow a bot or person perpetually downvoting subjects they disagree with yet not participating.

But people need to be aware that the votes are not private.

We could split the difference and users could get auto-notified if their vote was viewed and by whom. That way it’s a two-way street. The mod/admin can see your votes, the users know that their vote was accessed by that mod.

Second choice would be that all users are anonymized by a hash so that bad vote actors can be removed via their hash being associated with malicious or other bad acting, but to discover who individuals are the admin would have to do the legwork of follonf multiple posts/ comments to associate the hash.

No perfect solution.

Don’t know how that would be implemented, but someone needs to watch the watchers.

Otherwise hide the votes if trust of anonymity is paramount.

Everyone's fleshed out a lot of the discussions so I'll just bullet point my opinion to try to better explain the discourse I'm seeing on here

• I view "Lemmy" like it's a Community Center with group discussions, Community gatherings, and/or lectures with public comments. If you're in the crowd "Booing" (downvoting) without standing up and making your position clear, you're not adding anything to the discussion.

• Downvote/Upvote is not like "Booth Voting" at all. You have ONE vote in a democracy, that's the core principle. You don't vote Yes for a candidate then vote No for another. You don't see a ticker above the booth tallying everyone's vote that was before you (voter manipulation, why hidden scores became a thing).

• I think this would go over a lot better if mods had the choice of how to present the votes. Opt in or out of showing voters, opt in or out of showing scores or eliminating downvotes or even upvotes if you want. Give the power to the community and create useful tools for mods to try out.

Get rid of votes.

They’re only useful for ranking content and content is only useful in the context of ad revenue.

You don’t have to be on reddit anymore.

Yes by default, but there should be an option to make them public