Ask Lemmy

I prefer votes being semi-anonymous. The vote counts are technically public, you just have to use software that displays them, but that added barrier is enough for most people to never check and that is how I prefer it. I feel like seeing voter names just encourages getting into pissing contests about "why did you downvote me" which I don't want to happen because: A, votes don't matter and B, if someone downvoted without commenting they probably don't want to spend half an hour arguing in comments.

Because the reason for a vote is personal and different to everyone.

If I see a post with a title containing 20 emojis, I downvote it. Doesn’t matter the content of the post.

Now, assume that post was about fighting for lgbt rights or fighting against anti-abortion legislation. Some moral crusader sees my downvote and immediately calls me a bigot. When, from my perspective, all I did was downvote a bunch of emojis.

Take that idea and expand it.

I don't have a strong opinion on the matter, but it really seems like it would encourage stalking and revenge-downvotes.

I don't love the idea that Nazis can lookup that I voted against their propaganda when it appears here.

It'd probably lead to lots of small drama and every disagreement getting to a personal level. It's speculation at this point. I also think a decent chunk of people here aren't able to behave nicely. I'm not sure if we should grant them additional capabilities.

But it's not like voting here on Lemmy were the pinnacle of technical advances... It's an echo chamber for popular opinions and common and often uninspiring interests. I think we could change how it works, as it's not super great in the first place.

It leads to low quality communities banning people who downvote their posts, artificially inflating their engagement metrics

You know what I'm really against? People asking leading questions in asklemmy.

If you want to read up on people's objections, there's load of comments at https://lemmy.world/post/18805474 and the GitHub Issue it links to at https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/4967

I'm not personally in favour of ideas about voting privacy (I think it's a bit anti-Fediverse and hampers backfilling), but those who disagree tend to feel more strongly about it than I do, so I try to avoid arguments about it.

This may be overthinking things a bit but…

I mod a desert of a sub for my alma mater, and I’m pretty sure the same person downvotes everything I post there. No comments, just a single downvote. As a mod I would love to be able to confirm my suspicions, but as a user, I like my votes to be anonymous.

As a middle ground, perhaps the software itself could auto-mod a bit. If a single user only ever downvotes content from a community, and crosses a certain threshold, they might be soft-banned for some number of days with a note in the mod log to the effect of “negative contribution.” After some amount of time, the ban is automatically lifted. If a community mod notices that the same user keeps getting soft-banned every 30-something days (the soft-ban limit plus some amount of time for it to kick back in), they can decide if they want to ban the user.

To be clear - are you asking about a breakdown of who voted which way or just a per comment/post total (i.e. +6)

This seems like a you thing. I mean, with no big algorithmic promotion engine and no immediate reward for upvotes I just don't see the point either way.There's like a dozen of us around here and no prize for being popular. Who gives a crap? It's a little button thingy that helps you feel like you did a thing to the thing wihtout having to write a post and clutteirng the feed. It does its job.

Who says I am?

Votes don't matter. They are the hide button of Lemmy.

As an instance admin, you can see who voted what. Moderators are also able to view votes in their community. See discussion regarding vote privacy here: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/4967

I'd like to just see the name of the moderator that is banning me from 50 different communities they have the free time to moderate even if I've never posted in them because they disagreed with my opinion in one of them. I like to know who has skin thinner than the rice paper around a Botan candy.

Just wish there were more transparency around counts and content engagement.

Sure dude, I bet that's the only reason.

Imagine raging against the dude who downvoted you. That reasoning sounds more believable than "transparency". It was "that much" you had to ask a way to know WHO is downvoting you.

Imagine caring for who downvotes. How dare they.

Upvotes are public if you use mbin, not sure why downvotes are hidden