On multiple occasions a moderator has reached out to me and informed me an account existed purely to go through my comments and downvote me. I assume this is a common occurance and we could combat it better if we could see the votes.

likes and votes should be anonymous and user names should only be displayed for comments.

Idk if I trust that some powermod won't send me to hell if I vote against something they strongly believe in, akwardtheturtle style

Considering making votes public, not considering making mod actions inform the user they occur.

I can see where their priorities are.

Making votes something mods can see is one thing but public is whole other can of worms.

Edit: Spleling

Votes are already public? If they weren't, federation of votes wouldn't be possible.

This would be a catastrophic mistake. Please don't.

Yes, and there's no genuine argument otherwise.

If you want Lemmy to grow and not be completely overrun with bots posting propaganda and signal boosting extremism, showing votes is the only way forward. It's the only mechanism by which independent parties can discover and expose things like "every post and comment by this account is upvoted by these 20 other accounts that have never posted and whose names follow the same formula".

The privacy you're mourning never existed in the first place and it can't exist on any platform. For Lemmy, it's required for federation. On sites like Reddit, you have privacy from other users, but not from the company or anyone they sell that data to.

Since true privacy isn't an option, it would be far better to be open about that lack of privacy. This thread is already riddled with people who thought their votes were private, rather than just inconvient to look up. That's far more dangerous and deceptive.

This needs to happen, regardless of the ill-informed tantrums it may cause. If you want to upvote pornography without it being used against you, create accounts that are strictly for pornography and properly compartmentalize your accounts.

Nah. Votes are already visible to people using other applications than Lemmy, so let people use those if they want to see how people voted. It's fine as-is.

What's the benefit?

Like, what's the actual user experience gain from seeing someone else's votes? Is it just so the average joe can profile users, like for identifying bots or whatever? That's not rhetorical, I'm genuinely curious, as I don't see what I'd gain from this as a Lemmy user.

Bit as I see it, I really have no desire to do this. Maybe if I was a a pseudo mod on a spammy community I guess? But comments are already a decent indicator.

I understand that this information is already basically public but there is a thin barrier to the average nitwit user accessing such information and going in a rampage screwing with people who have downvoted them. I'll say this, if they make it more public I think I will just simply stop voting. I will continue to use Lemmy but only as a passive user.

If I can't vote privately then I don't vote.

They should put the rest of the nails in this coffin. Go full clique.

Should be a server setting, just like how some servers can choose to show combined votes or separate up/down votes.

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

This is an interesting conundrum.
On one hand it would help locate foreign agent bots/bad faith actors faster and recognize vote manipulation by bot farms.
On the other it will lead to even more account-stalking problems, user drama, and would further enable vote dogpiling if you see certain known users voted a certain way.

I'm inclined to say no. They are already "public" if one wants to put in the effort to admin a standalone instance or run alts on multiple services they can see if they care- I personally don't really care

One of the things I liked back in Kbin was being able to see who upvoted. Some people were lurkers who didn't comment, but it was still nice to always see them take an interest in the material. Felt more like they were a regular in the community.