Lemmy votes ARE public, should they be anonymous?

Currently, almost anyone in the Fediverse can see Lemmys votes. Lemmy admins can see votes, as well as mods. Only regular Lemmy users can't. Should the Lemmy devs create a way to make the votes anonymous?

There is a discussion going on right now considering "making the Lemmy votes public" but I think that premisse is just wrong. The votes are public already, they're just hidden from Lemmy users. Anyone from a kbin/mbin/fedia instance can check out the votes if they are so inclined.

The users right now may fall into a false sense of privacy when voting because the votes are hidden from Lemmy users. If you want to vote something and not show up on the vote list, please create another account to support that type of content and don't tell anyone.

You're viewing a single thread.

261 comments

I'm at the completely opposite end of the spectrum of most people, they should be public to all. It makes it clear whether the guy downvoting you is doing so maliciously or as a non-participant. Same for upvotes. Otherwise, just get rid of it and find some better mechanism. The people saying "NO!" or that they should be anonymous don't really have a reason, your comment history is already giving you away and no one has a problem with that.
The worst thing public upvotes/downvotes might lead to are the same things your comments are already profiled for by the same people that would and perhaps a random getting mad at your downvote or upvote and voting back, which doesn't matter that much with the current karma system. The benefits, however, are a clear vision of where those upvotes and downvotes are coming from, without it you are a blind person in a social networks but with it you can tell who is interacting with you and you can investigate why and even make judgement calls because you can see whether they interact like a jerk.
No drama witch hunts, accountability for the way you are interacting online, the the benefits outweighs the drawbacks, but people don't want it because they feel insecure about it. I specially favor it because it could be a first step for a form of crowdsourced moderation (speculated on it here), where you can choose the people you think are voting comments to your taste to eventually have a select group large enough to determine which should show up first and which shouldn't show at all, and it could be completely complementary to existing systems. Don't want to see "yes, I agree" comments sorting as the most relevant? You might choose people who do not upvote but have engaged with the rest of the thread for comments you consider more informative.
No one from kbin/mbin instances can check out the downvotes you make, since this attitude has been so widespread many don't report it to those instances. They can see people who upvote, and the sky hasn't fallen because of it. Anonymity largely only helps the minority making the drama remain hidden.
- the world is an interesting place, the very reasons you gave "for" it is why I was against it. I don't agree that it won't cause witch hunts, and from the POV of the commentor it might be nice, but from the POV of the person who is giving the vote, it's a severe downgrade.
  Especially considering the fact that if the person downvoted but didn't leave a comment afterward they likely would not have downvoted in the first place if it wasn't anonymous because they don't want to have to deal with the social interaction of someone trying to push them to explain further. Not everything needs a detailed this is why I feel this way, that's why there is a upvo and down vote system in the first place, to prevent everyone from leaving a comment of I agree with this / I disagree with this / this is on topic / this is off topic
  In addition to this, to say that no one's giving reasons of why voting should be private, I don't think that's a truthful statement there are plenty of reasons that people have provided via privacy, security and sometimes just mental state.
  You mentioned that you want to have a system where you choose what people you see and the people you don't agree with don't appear., I think that type of environment is extremely unhealthy for a social media platform. It's why other platforms that have curated that content is starting to become a cesspool. I really don't want to see lemmy become one big Echo chamber, it's not healthy to have only one ideology that you see at all times and let's face it that's what that system you're proposing would introduce.
  Additionally the system your proposing is going to run into the same issue as the other websites that have attempted to do, this sort of system leads to new people inadvertently getting filtered out as untrustworthy, which will mean that they're not getting activity on their posts/ comments as well which means that they're just going to move on to another platform.
  Honestly, I think I would rather just have the score system be removed as a whole then see that type of system implemented
  
  I know that's probably why you do, like I said, people feel really insecure about it. I don't really respect irrational insecurity though. Your comment history could also lead to witch hunts, yet no worries there... If it does need to be handled, it should be done by automatically deleting your old up/downvotes and comments. But no one is asking for that with comments either... They only take in issue because they don't want to be held accountable to their votes, even if the probability is practically zero and extremely exceptional.
  If you really don't want to explain why you are downvoting, I really don't think people should be downvoting. I very rarely downvote, and there are plenty of comments I neither upvote or downvote simply because not everything should be rated nor am I capable of doing so. It is toxic.
  You already have a system where people with alts and moderation privileges decide what you see and don't see, this will happen regardless with information saturation. What I want to have is putting that in the hands of the users. Whether it will be good or bad will depend on the users, and because it would be complementary, you could still accept the traditional or default method. More choice is not bad, it is the users that make it bad, and in this case, they would make it bad only for themselves. But it would also be easy to work this system into something like https://ground.news , where as with a homogeneous imposition you don't have a choice nor even an idea of what is being censored if you don't go out of your way to find out. If it's completely transparent, you could even look through the eye of another user's moderation settings to see the sort of content they are getting.
  Not sure where you are pulling the "new users get filtered out as untrustworthy", the system I'm proposing would do not such thing. This seems more like a projected insecurity without specific examples that can be countered.
  Without a karma system, the problem then goes back to which comments show up first and which might not show up at all. That's just a traditional forum thread, where the newest comments do.
  
  If you really don’t want to explain why you are down-voting, I really don’t think people should be down-voting.
  there are many times that you can down-vote without a requirement of explaining. Sometimes your point has already been made by another person, other times it's just a really bad take or the person is so dead-set that honestly you couldn't change the persons mind even if you explained it. Sometimes the comment is just hostile to the current situation or the OP, sometimes the comment is just super off-topic. Some situations allow for down-votes without explaining it.
  I personally down-vote for off-topic and harassing posts as it helps the system sort what is considered helpful to the discussion. I would refuse to down-vote for harassing and off-topic if this system is in place, as it creates an attack vector for the person to come after me, a situation that would require either blocking them or bugging a mod for, which is something that personally I just don't want to deal with in my life so I would simply just not participate in the vote.
  Not sure where you are pulling the “new users get filtered out as untrustworthy”,
  The type of system proposed inherently causes it as a side effect. When you have a system that is crowdsourced from the popular opinion, you create an echo chamber that only shows content from sources that have been deemed as appropriate, as such not only do you lose the arguing side, you also lose content from people who are not established/just starting out as they are not profiled as that side. as for examples? Two examples of sites that use that style system include Stackoverflow, which uses a rep system to decide how much access you can get into, and some of the larger reddit sites which went off the karma system to even allow posting in them. There are also other examples in reddit, but the karma block system was the most predominant (followed by sub rule filters which filtered out based off bias).
  I do believe that a karma system is best type of system however I believe that the metric should be hidden from sight. This will allow for helpful comments to rise to the top, but will remove the hard focus "score" ideology that everyone has. In this system you wouldn't know if you were down-voted in the first place, which means you wouldn't be aware of someone maliciously down-voting you, and it would also do what you want where it would force someone if they had a super big issue with what was posted to actually comment on it. That being said, this system can not exist in a federated environment so therefore the next best thing is either anonymous (to all but mods/admins due to moderation and federation control reasons) or just not having the system as a whole.
  
  If those are your examples, then you are misunderstanding my proposition. Some of the reasons you suggest to downvote are not good reasons to me, but that's point, everyone has their own criteria and their own preferences for the comments they would like to be reading over others. By denying them the ability to choose, you are imposing an arbitrary and fallible karma system. Hiding it really doesn't fix it, you are denying the alternative because you feel the absolute worst case will occur. Yet right now it is possible, and does not happen.

261 comments