Fediverse

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.

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.

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?

If a website could be sure none of their users are malicious/bots and all of the users are perfectly rational and virtuous then public or private voting wouldn't matter either way. That being nearly impossible, why not a reputation based system like Stack Exchange? Only when an account meets certain requirements they can vote.

To boot, on the website tweakers.net one can actually vote -1, …, +3.

• +3: “Spotlight comments are of such high quality and substantive value that they clearly stand out above the rest”
• +2: “Informative and interesting comments that are a useful addition to the discussion in an on-topic thread or the information in the article”
• +1: “Nice on-topic responses with knowledge that is common knowledge”
• +0: “Comments that do not contain a relevant contribution, but are posted with good intentions”
• -1: “Flamebaits, trolls, misplaced jokes, unnecessarily hurtful comments and other comments that violate our terms and conditions or house rules”

[Posted this comment on GitHub.]

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.

No.

If they are shown to mods and admins then all the positives from the list are already included no?

What do users have to do with detecting „patterns” and bad accounts?

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

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.

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

Do not want.

It is baffling to me how many people want to copy Reddit voting system, including hiding voting history, despite having left Reddit. The entire voting system over there is a huge part of the toxicity problem.

Downvotes should be removed, all votes public. Accountability changes peoples’ behavior and I can tell you that before kbin.social went down you could definitely see the difference.

This is clearly an unpopular opinion and I will be downvoted like crazy for it, but it is so exhausting watching forum after forum make the exact same mistakes.

Let's create separate accounts for voting and for posting so to improve anonymity and freedom of expression.

Make it optional and opt-in.

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.

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.