Lemmy devs are considering making all votes public - have your say

Gathered some thoughts here

Potential positives:

• Any admin can already review voting activity, but some people don't realize that. This change would make it less surprising
• it would make it easier for non-admin users to study voting activity and find abuse
• it would make it consistent with other platforms that we federate with, which can already see votes

Potential downsides:

• People will report voting activity that they don't like, even if it's not malicious.
  • Admins will need to set up rules on what activity they will act on (and also take action against people that spam bad reports).
  • It would also help to have automated tools to review voting activity since it's hard to do that manually.
• It's another option for abuse, similar to bringing up past comment history

Both could be dealt with but it would make moderation somewhat harder

Likely bad:

• Mods and admins can ban people for upvoting content in communities they aren't in charge of. This might work on a small scale, but I'd caution against it because it often misses nuance:
  • it's very easy to accidentally vote on something while scrolling (unless there is a consistent pattern)
  • even if the community is seen as "bad", the post might be good (ex. it could be calling out the community)

Bad

• it lowers the barrier for other types of abuse, such as tracking vote activity for advertising, approximating when a user is asleep, etc