Allow it to be configurable by server or community. Some communities may benefit from allowing the public or mods to see votes, while others would be hurt by it.
Fediverse
A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).
If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to !moderators@lemmy.world!
Rules
- Posts must be on topic.
- Be respectful of others.
- Cite the sources used for graphs and other statistics.
- Follow the general Lemmy.world rules.
Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration), Search Lemmy
Generally speaking, you shouldn't do anything on the internet that you absolutely don't want to become public. If you don't want people to know your votes, don't vote.
I support opening up vote logs to moderators in their own communities. Voting records add useful context to the nature of the exchanges happening, eg. if two people are having a back and forth, but neither is downvoting the other, it contextualizes the disagreement as less hostile.
I don't think it's a good idea to give every new user the burden of using that information responsibly. A minority would use it to retaliate, stalk, and harass, and there would be too many of them to reasonably hold them accountable.
Having seen the complete absence of mayhem on kbin caused by vote visibility, the absolute and utter nothing that will come of this decision leads me to say yeah, sure. That said, I’d prefer improved mod tools over this, but option c isn’t listed.
In my opinion this setting should be set by the use. Whether they want their votes to be shown to public. If they deny Lemmy would just show "upvoted by anon" or something.
There are merits for it and against it. My biggest concerns would be privacy regarding data scrapers .
Regarding poor behavior, I really think that ultimately comes down to moderation on the platform. I've only had a few poor experiences but I am also someone who sometimes sees certain threads as dumpster fires and refrains from joining in or refrains from responding when I feel there isn't any form of discussion or chatter to be had. I can understand that it likely happens more often than not but I also believe that moderation is the only reasonable way of curbing it. Moderation teams have to make it clear that the behavior is not welcome and that it will be dealt with.