Votes on Lemmy should be transparent.
Votes on Lemmy should be transparent.
By that I mean that you should be able to drill into post and comment votes, and see the users.
Votes for me are really just a temperature gauge, for me to see if the content I'm posting is appreciated by a community. Other than that, they don't actually seem to have too much impact on this platform, likely because of scale and algorithm (or lack there of).
That being said, I've noticed some mild, weird "turf war" style downvote brigading of community posts. Not botting per say, but deliberate and individual shitty behavior. It's ultimately no more than a mild annoyance, but I think transparency into the social voting behavior of users would encourage accountability.
Rabble rabble anonymity though!
There's no actual impact to a user's anonymity. There's just less of a free pass to act shitty and not get the boot from a community, under whatever moniker and internet personality type you choose.
Interesting take. So is it your stance that a community should ban or retain folks based on what they've up/down voted? Seems like (if that's the case) you'd run into very little diversity of thought in most communities. Which is fine if that's the goal I guess.
If that's a community's prerogative, then yes. I think they'd either build an echo chamber, or sink their own ship if they were so shrewd, but that's also motivation to form healthier competing communities.
Myself, as a mod of a few, just want tools to remove users that aren't contributing and truly just dishing out mass downvotes to those that are.
I see. Makes sense.
How about a user-specific option to hide votes? Like a NSFW toggle.
That way, people who don’t want to deal with votes don’t have to, while those that like anonymous voting can retain that privacy.
There are plenty of times when people want to express disapproval without getting roped into a discussion (see: bad faith actors and other trolls). Sure, there’s always going to be people downvoting things for any reason under the sun, but I see that as noise in an otherwise often useful graph. If you see more noise, then it might help to not see anything.
I forgot Lemmy users can't see who upvoted/downvoted something (votes are still visible in Kbin)
I've noticed there are people who just spam with downvotes for no reason (downvoting a certain community's posts, downvoting all comments under a post, downvoting all posts/comments made by someone they may not like etc), it's pretty weird
You know what's funny is that none of that downvote spamming I mentioned seems to be coming from kbin users. Which further supports my opinion that transparency breeds accountability.
If you run your own instance you can get that info from the db.
I more so envision it as a per-community and/or per-post flag. "Enable vote transparency" type toggle, that way there's some ability to cater to the community. Because I expect there may be fringe cases where the subject matter is sensitive enough, to where voter anonymity should be available.
I’ve read something about being able to see who up and down votes from kbin. I’m not that fluent in fediverse to say much more than that.
First, votes aren't exactly transparent, but they also aren't completely private either. User voting records are stored in databases that instance owners have access to, so it's possible for them to see (and/or even publish) up/down voting history. KBin already does this publicly. So I can see an argument being made that if the info is available to some people, it should be available to all people.
Personally, I wouldn't care if my upvotes and downvotes are exposed to the commenters/posters that I voted on, but I'm concerned about the possibility of it being used for discrimination. Imagine me following/participating in a community and then being immediately banned from that community solely because a community moderator didn't like how I upvoted/downvoted on things. For example, say I want to participate in a philosophy or politic themed community and one of the mods there just happens to be very conservative and decides to exclude me just because I upvoted something that was NSFW once upon a time and they disapproved of that behavior? This will absolutely happen if all voting is public. On reddit, a similar form of discrimination happened by analyzing where people posted and they would be banned from certain subreddits just based on the other subreddits they have been active on- and even worse was that this was often done by a bot without regard for the actual comments made. I recall a very specific example of someone who used to hop into r/conservative to challenge or antagonize certain lines of thinking and they were banned from liberal/progressive subreddits because of their activity on r/conservative despite the fact that they were not sympathetic to anything on r/conservative. That same discrimination can (and probably does) happen on Lemmy already, but making voting history public will take it to the next level.
If voting ever did become public on lemmy, then at a minimum users should be able to see/review/audit their voting history and be given the ability to retroactively delete some/all of it.
You're also ignoring the fact that it's trivial to create/use alternate lemmy accounts. If voting records were public, it would just drive people to create multiple accounts from which to vote on things - to compartmentalize their interactions with different communities or users. Since this fact means that users would STILL be able to hide/mask their voting history, I think this is a good argument that it makes no logical sense to make voting records public.
I think an ideal solution would be for users to just have a choice to make their voting public or to keep it private, or to selectively publicize or keep secret on a vote-by-vote bases.