This is one of the downfalls of a distributed system. You basically need public votes. Without it, instances lack critical information about the validity of votes. You don’t have a centralized system with back door access to monitor and maintain things.

The fact that the devs even considered this is a bad sign, IMO. How out of touch does one have to be to think this is a good thing in any capacity?

If a website could be sure none of their users are malicious/bots and all of the users are perfectly rational and virtuous then public or private voting wouldn't matter either way. That being nearly impossible, why not a reputation based system like Stack Exchange? Only when an account meets certain requirements they can vote.

To boot, on the website tweakers.net one can actually vote -1, …, +3.

• +3: “Spotlight comments are of such high quality and substantive value that they clearly stand out above the rest”
• +2: “Informative and interesting comments that are a useful addition to the discussion in an on-topic thread or the information in the article”
• +1: “Nice on-topic responses with knowledge that is common knowledge”
• +0: “Comments that do not contain a relevant contribution, but are posted with good intentions”
• -1: “Flamebaits, trolls, misplaced jokes, unnecessarily hurtful comments and other comments that violate our terms and conditions or house rules”

[Posted this comment on GitHub.]

I am kind of afraid that if voting becomes more public than it already is, it will lead exactly to more of the kind of "zero-content downvote" accounts mentioned in the ticket. Because some people are just wildly irrational when it comes to touchy subjects, and aint nobody got time to spend an eternity with them dismantling their beliefs so they understand the nuance you see that they don't (If they even let you). So it kind of incentivizes people to create an account like that to ensure a crazy person doesn't latch on to the account you're trying to have normal discussions with.

But I understand that they can technically already do this if they wanted to. So perhaps it will be fine as long as we fight against vote viewing being weaponized as a community.

No.

Guarentee you will start witch hunts by making the votes more accessible. But if you want every user to be able to do that then go ahead. My ability to keep myself occupied here is already not that large, maybe some witch hunts are what we need to drive engagement up /s

it should be a setting per instance to hide/show all, some or none

If they are shown to mods and admins then all the positives from the list are already included no?

What do users have to do with detecting „patterns” and bad accounts?

Yes. The act of voting a comment up or down shouldn't be much different to hitting reply to that comment.

Upvote/downvote systems do exist to overcome those "+1" "-1" posts on old forums. You are not voting for the legislative elections. You are just interacting with another person comment/post in a way that does not require writing. If post comments, are not anonymous, upvotes/downvotes shouldn't be anonymous as well.

Do not want.

Let's create separate accounts for voting and for posting so to improve anonymity and freedom of expression.

Make it optional and opt-in.

Maybe make it possible for a server to only share aggregate votes on a given post?

Like a proxy vote, where only the server knows who it belonged too.

I don't see how that's much different from making a comment, it's not election, how is voting on a comment/post different from voicing your opnion with a comment?

Do I prefer the completely private option? Yes, but if the alternative is that some people can see and others can't, I prefer that everyone can see it.

I could go either way, but I don't think "other platforms have public voting" doesn't seem all that convincing. Who cares? I don't care who voted on what, and I doubt most others do either.

While there are workarounds, leaving it as is at least weeds out the majority of trolls who aren't technically inclined enough to go pull up A to see how B voted on C.