Lemmy devs are considering making all votes public

Hard no from me

I don't want some nutjob with too much time stalking me because I upvoted something about climate change or downvoted some bigoted shit. We all know those fuckos are out there

Voting on Reddit-like platforms is soft moderation by a community, and if you disincentive that, the whole model kinda falls apart IMO

Your votes are already public. It’s a matter of (a) do we want to make it slightly easier for the people who aren’t technically inclined to see them too (b) do we want people acting with the awareness that they’re public.

(a) doesn’t have a clear answer to me. The answer to (b), though, is clearly yes.
- Your votes are already public.
  
  People say this all the time, but it's not really the case.
  
  I don't think privacy is a binary thing that one either has or does not - there are degrees of privacy. Currently what we have is mostly private, requiring either technical skill or admin access to circumvent. This is a pretty high bar which 99% of people would not be able to reach. You're proposing removing the bar entirely because it is not high enough.
- (b) will just lead to fewer up and down votes, i.e. less engagement. That in turn could lead to slowly bleeding out.
- I would like a (c) where my instances collects all the votes on the post, and then transmits an anonymized aggregate.
- My votes on piefed are not public. This dev took the obvious idea of a dedicated voting agent and implemented it in about 48 hours.
I agree with you. I remember arguing about this a year ago when people first discovered votes were public on Kbin. I don't want to obsess over who up- or downvoted me and I don't want anyone else doing that either. Discussions are healthier when voting is anonymous (or at least obscured as is currently the case).

If bots become such an overwhelming problem that all regular users need access to voting records to better report all the bots I'll maybe revisit my stance. But right now the gains seem dubious.
Yep. Same for me.
Mod-admins are already doing this, even if you vote and don't comment on something.
Isn't the obvious thing to just have it be an option that admins can enable or disable? Maybe have a third option for only showing upvotes? Then it's up to each instance to decide, and users can decide to go to instances with the option their prefer.
If they're a serial downvoter, then it's easier for you to track them and block them as well. Double edged sword i think
- I thought blocks were one way - you can't see anything from the person you blocked, but they can still see your stuff?
- I downvoted SO much more on Reddit than I do here. The comment quality here is leagues better.
- That's why I'd like it.
It's already public, it's just lemmy users who don't see them.
What might be interesting would be to have it displayed, but grouped by instance. That way we could see some data and potentially uncover troll instances or attempts to brigade the conversation without opening ourselves up to personal attacks.
I don’t want some nutjob with too much time stalking me because I upvoted something about climate change or downvoted some bigoted shit.

They can read your comment history why would you care about them being able to see what you upvoted?

Voting on Reddit-like platforms is soft moderation by a community, and if you disincentive that,

How does that disincentive it? It actually makes it better
- I specifically don't comment on people that give off the vibe they might be one of those kind of nutjobs, precisely because it gives them a notification with my username attached if I do. I'm on this site to kill some time with low effort, I want to minimise the risk of attracting the attention of some weirdo.
  
  I downvote in those scenarios and then report if appropriate. If enough other users feel the same way the comment goes down to the bottom of the thread and fewer users see it. Especially if it's something that a mod eventually removes, as it reduces the reach until a mod can get to it.
  
  If I risk retaliation for doing that, I (and others) will just stop, meaning those comments stay up front & centre and we lose that soft moderation plus that engagement in general. Going into the comments will just end up being a worse experience
I don’t want some nutjob with too much time stalking me because I upvoted something about climate change or downvoted some bigoted shit. We all know those fuckos are out there

I'm dealing with one right now! lol It's crazy.
- You don't even have serial downvoters. You have a few comments without many downvotes. You just consistently post the worst possible political pisstakes repeatedly and constantly and nobody likes them when they run across it every time.

No, votes should not be displayed public.

Blocking those who downvote creates further polarisation, echo chambers and an environment more hostile to discussion and honest exchange.

Following those who upvote creates personality cults and nepotism and devalues the content.

environment more hostile to discussion and honest exchange.

"Voting" and "discussion" are separate things. The old forums did not have voting but still had polarization, personal attacks, hellthreads, etc.

The problem is that Reddit/Facebook turned "voting" from a tool meant to measure "quality" (e.g, this post is relevant to the community, this comment does not add to the discussion) into a tool to measure "popularity" (I agree with this, so I vote up. I don't like this, so I downvote).

Either get rid of voting altogether, or let's bring back a culture where "votes" are meant to signal quality.
- Redditors did that, rather than reddit I'd argue. Still the same result of becoming a far less useful heuristic though.
  
  Not really sure how to "fix" a system like that, which depends on the masses to do something correctly. They... don't.
- (Score: 5, Insightful)
Maybe the upvotes should only be available to the person who owns the comment or post. Maybe to the mods and admins, too?
Same idiots playing games with each others in the open is better than bots and manipulation going on behind the scenes.

Do not make votes public. It will lead to personal attacks.

They're already public if you look via kbin or run your own instance.
The experience of kbin and mbin users say otherwise, however.
- I guess all 6 of them can be trusted. Lol
- Because the fediverse isn't as big as you think it is and so the number of crazies aren't a problem yet.
- It leads to an even bigger echo chamber, people with unpopular opinions will get ostracized not just for their comments, but even for their voting. There's a reason why any real democracy has secret votes.
Vote in good faith and if someone attacks you they will be on the wrong side
Enabling retaliation disincentivizes personal attacks

I think people misunderstand. I too would prefer privacy, but theres a big BUT.

Due to how the federation works, anyone who is tech savvy enough can already see votes. One way is to run an instance.

This change doesn't lower privacy, it aligns expectations with reality. A false sense of privacy, which people obviously show here in the comments, is way more dangerous.

I accept if a dozen people can see my votes.

That's not what you're saying.

Ultimately I'm not invested in this decision. If the instance wants to watch people vote then people stop voting truly or at all.
- Except, if you're using anything other than Lemmy at this point that information is already about. The Likes/Dislikes are considered public information by the protocol. Lemmy devs probably just didn't get around to building out the UI for that before the Reddit APIcolypse.
I read about that. In my opinion is that what should change, if possible. There are good reasons why votes a secret in democracies.
- That would be great. I'm not sure how to solve the problems that arises though. If i can send an anonymous vote to an instance, what stops me from sending 100?
  Maybe there's some smart cryptographical solution here that alludes me, but it seems hard, if possible.
- Then again, private votes would be private for mods and admins too. So no more moderating vote brigading or downvote abuse or anything like that.
- There are good reasons why votes a secret in democracies.
  
  Because voters only receive a voting ballot after they identify themselves as a real citizen with a real passport?
- Even on github they are public. Lol
If this is a hard requirement for federation, then I guess federated services are not for me, as I value my privacy more than I care to use them.

I think it's a bad idea. It's just going to start harassment and witch hunts when someone gets a downvote they don't like. Stalking is going to be a thing, people are going to aggregate all the votes you've done to make assumptions about you to then bully you. Once public, sources outside Lemmy will start gathering and cross referencing data about you.

In the US, when you vote, the vote is private to protect the person. Making votes public will only empower those that would abuse it. It very well could end Lemmy due to massive bulling, harassment, and the decline of activity.

Boy oh boy, it sure is a mystery why democracies have people vote privately

The last thing I need is people knowing I upvoted a nsfw post, so nope thanks.

Found the one guy who watches porn!
- that sick bastard
Most clients make having multiple accounts super easy.

Not that I'd know anything about that 🫣
But they know already, if they are on mbin or run their own instance.
mbin users can see that right now.
- how?
Own your kinks.
And in turn teach not to kink shame.

Be a voice of change for the kind in this hateful world.

I rather not. If it does happen, I’ll just rss Lemmy and stop using my account. I like Lemmy the way it is because there’s not much focus on votes and more on actual discussion.

Every single one of your upvotes on lemmy is already public due to how the protocol works, it's just currently obscured by a bit of work to get them (have to run your own instance, assuming there already isn't some online tool to easily look them up)

Making them publicly and easily visible would only remove the illusion of privacy we currently have, not actually make your upvote logs less secured in any way
- For me, personally, it’s more about the focus of votes vs actual discussion. I’m worried it would turn the tides and make people much more focused on the votes than actual discussion. It might make it echo chamber-ish.
  
  I recently disabled showing votes on my side (through Voyager app). Even if I get downvoted a hundred times over, if I just get a respectful discussion with links to (trustable) sources. I’m all alright with that.

Have you SEEN the drama that happens in this place? I feel like this is just asking for weird nobodies to harass anyone who quietly disagrees with them.

If this passes then I'm outta here.

I was really confused seeing this post, because I always assumed that Lemmy votes were public. Because how else are instances going to sync them? And indeed, the API exposes them completely, this change will just make it easier.

Then I was really confused when I saw so many comments being against it. A lot of "I'll leave if votes become public" in here. That's a lot of people who somehow assumed Lemmy was private. Aren't we all supposed to be Linux nerds in here?

No thank you. I've already had one person go off on me because of some perceived offense: https://lemm.ee/comment/13768482

This is exactly what worries me about this idea.
- Same, that is my worry as well.

Not everyone has a github account and can comment or vote there.

But, agree. Don't think any good will come from making votes public. Any pro/con should be measured against who it benefits. If it's mods or devs, there are always alternatives

If it's end-users, consider the edge-cases and the repercussions of malicious actors having access to those individual preferences.

tbf, github accounts are free

I'm seeing lots of comments here saying that server admins can already see vote data, and therefore it is not private.

But from my point of view, having a handful of people able to extract voting data using their position of trust on the lemmy network is very different from broadcasting voting data to everyone on lemmy. And although you can argue that it is possible to create a new server and federate and blah-blah-blah to view votes; that argument sounds to me like "don't bother locking your front door, because that type of lock can be defeated by a lock-picking tools."

And even aside from all that discussion about who can access what; there is another key point that I think is overlooked: Making voter information public makes it 'normal' thing to monitor and discuss. Currently there is an expectation that people won't look at or discuss that information (even if they hypothetically could get access). But by making it public, the expectation then is that everyone will look at that information. That would create a change in tone and meaning of votes and discussion around votes.

I would hate to have to deal with "why did you downvote me?" comments, but I'm also not sure I would have the self control to abstain from leaving such a comment myself.

I think that making vote identities easily accesible to every user runs the risk of increasing harassment and decreasing discussion quality.

This would probably escalate a lot of arguments that break out in comment sections.

I fear this, too, but I'm not sure what that'd look like. Would people tag someone who downvoted them and act like they're entitled to an explanation? That would probably(?) earn a block from me.

Edit: never mind, that's exactly the kind of thing that happens, it seems.
- I'd go for the block and move on approach as well. Nobody is entitled to an explanation.
Happened to me just now in this very comment section! lmao
- Grow a spine

I don't want votes to be public, but they already are, so.

Someone can easily host a website to leak this information and people should know, instead of believing they are private

I’ve already seen admins go through the federated votes on their instance to call out anyone who disagrees with them.

I don’t have a strong opinion either way but I don’t think it will be healthy for discourse to unlock that power for everyone

Please No

Every vote is recorded in activitypub and carries or else it wouldn't know you already voted. That information is public on other instances currently, so people you are responding to may have that information.
Please Yes

I would say no. I don't want some dumbass to interogate me about why I downvotes thia and why I upvoted that.

Lemmy is already a privacy nightmare, in some way. There was a comment showing the screengrab of those peiple who upvoted and downvoted a post. Basically, if you self-host an instance, you'll have access to these. This can easily be weaponized by certain organizations that want to create profiling of lemmy users, e.g NSA and Intelligence agencies.

What a horrible fucking idea. You are want this place to be an even bigger echo chamber than it already is? Yes, let's allow the majority of one opinion brigade people's histories to further ostracized them!

Admins, for smart people, can be fucking idiots.

This is why they need to make this change, right now theres a false sense of privacy. If I really wanted to see your votes right now, all I need to do is to set up my own instance.
- That's not necessarily a false sense of privacy if it works. There's an inconvenient barrier to searching vote history and if you do it in the current system you'd be recognized as petty at least. Easing access is not going to make Lemmy better.
- "All you'd need to do is set up an instance" is waaaayyyyyy more work than "all you need to do is click their profile"
The protocol fundamentally exposes them. Absent protocol changes, if someone hasn't already, sooner or later they'll just make a website to look them up.
- There are many things that don't happen because nobody does them. Or should we start walking around in a bullet proof vest in case we're shot?
Votes already are public to all server admins (I can see exactly what you voted for in communities my instance knows about).
What a horrible fucking idea.

Do you have a better idea to make it easier to flag bots and government propaganda?
- It's pretty simple for me. Privacy is a good thing, lack of privacy is a bad thing. Think of the children arguments, which your line of thinking is akin to, is not justification to remove anonymous interactions.

Seems fine? Voting was, at best, only slightly anonymous anyway because other platforms that get the AP action will happily tell you exactly who did what when even if the Lemmy UI doesn't.

And, honestly, if you don't want your fake and nearly anonymous internet name associated with doing something, eh, maybe that's a sign you shouldn't do it?

Yeah - dont upvote laydyboys unless you want all to know you like them. Its a sign you shouldnt do it.

Also all books you lend from the library should be public knowledge. No hiding!!
- Also all books you lend from the library should be public knowledge.
  
  Terrible analogy. You can consume the post without anyone knowing. Voting is more akin to signing the guestbook.
- I mean, nice strawman but what was more happening was you were telling your friend you liked ladyboys, and then your friend ran outside and told anyone and everyone who would listen that you liked ladyboys.
  
  The only real change here is the Lemmy UI would stop lying to you about votes being private, because they never were.
- dont upvote laydyboys unless you want all to know you like them. Its a sign you shouldnt do it.
  
  This. Unironically.
  
  There is no such thing as privacy in the public internet. There never was. I take it as a given that if some loser decides to look me up they will dig even my IRC chat logs from some server I used to connect almost 30 years ago.
  
  Anything you do in the public internet, you need to ready to own it publicly. If you want/need real privacy, this is the wrong place to be.

Absolutely not.

This will like lots of other people say start witch hunts and people will absolutely develop bots and websites which scrape all that information and classify all users based on that. Like those Reddit sites where you can search for a user and see where they are active and all that. But this will be worse.

Probably for the best if downvotes remain less easy to access, at the very least. There's a myth that people who are suicidal will "find a way even if you take away some of the easier methods", which is explicitly false. If you take away the easy option, you are directly reducing the harm that easy option might have caused. https://gizmodo.com/why-have-people-stopped-committing-suicide-with-gas-5959303

If the admins take away the quick and easy option for seeing who downvoted your passionate comment, the mods are directly reducing the number of people who go on rants about downvotes and targeted vitriol.

It has nothing to do with privacy; this is a public forum that by it's very nature, requires that all activity be easily available to all the sites you federate with. There is not privacy in that.

This is about the type of community that forms around the software. Do we want to encourage, and make easily available, the list of people who disagree with you? Or do we want to to put minor barriers around that to help keep the number of people who do that low?

I'm not sure the comparison to suicide holds up. I could just as easily compare it with migration where it is absolutely true that people will find a way to migrate even if you take away the easier methods. It's simply completely different things.
- Not sure what you mean about migration. People absolutely do move less when it is made harder to move. Mitigation isn't perfect, it never is, but for damn sure it helps.
  
  Just because the wall is dumb as fuck doesn't mean it didn't stop at least a few people from crossing the border.

Hard no. I'll move on like I did a year ago from Reddit, and I was on that site for 14 years.

Just from a political/nation-state viewpoint, it would needlessly expose information to make it easier for countries and political parties to keep some kind of "social score" and decide when to do something to you. China already does this kind of stuff.

We need to make it easier for everyone/anyone to do this? Think about all of the super-divisive issues at hand. People can already get a sense of your views from your responses, and that should be it.

State/nation actors can easily track this information without an UI setting. Just set up any software that uses activitypub and subscribe to any AP group (i.e, Lemmy community) that you want to get up votes/downvotes (Like/Dislike activities).
- Man I would have assumed that information would be cryptographically obfuscated while still being verifiable, like monero.
Just so you're aware

https://kbin.earth/m/[email protected]/t/267356/Lemmy-devs-are-considering-making-all-votes-public-have-your/favourites
- I'm not sure what this is supposed to tell me, sorry man.
Votes are already public, lemmy just doesn't let you see them in the interface.

What will this accomplish other than facilitate brigading?

No, as it would create a lot of excuses for targeted harrassment and just increase toxicity

Excuses are only that, especially if your instance has already implemented robust server rules against harassment.

I think the real sign of toxicity is weighting (perceived) anonymity over accountability for your actions on any platform. I'll vote for transparency any day.
- Accountability, really? Okay, what's your full legal name and address? If you're totally fine with your idea of accountability, why not tell us all?

I say no. Privacy.

Comments say they're already basically public. I don't know anything about that, but it's probably better to merely have a camera in your toilet than have a camera in your toilet that livestreams 24/7.

But I don't have an especially informed sense of how to run a platform so maybe there's a bunch of crap I'm not thinking about.

I don't see the benefits but I see drama this would cause.

So the annoying neckbeard i downvoted for being an annoying neckbeard is gonna DM me?

Aren't they already practically public, given the federation?

VOTES ARE ALREADY PUBLIC.

If you are using Lemmy because you want privacy, you've already missed the boat, everything is wide assed open for datamining and advertising fingerprinting.

I'd hoped for an open system with open APIs and open implementations that allow everyone equal access to the system and bring equal accountability.

If people just want Reddit style fiefdoms with no real public accountability possible, then make a blackjack and hookers fork.

I'm really not interested in a system that bakes in more authoritarian secrecy and control, which could very well be an unexpected outcome of backlash to how this has been presented.

It should actually be made more private.

Many people in this thread seem to not realize that votes are essentially public already - this is only about whether the Lemmy UI should make it a bit easier to see the votes. They can already be seen quite easily if you know how.

However, there is an easy solution to this problem. This is clearly a controversial decision, so don't make a choice for everyone. Make it an option. Any admin can decide for themselves whether their instance should allow users to see votes.

That also means that users can decide to go to instances where the votes are hidden or public.

This approach leaves the choice to the individual, rather than forcing the choice on everyone.

It's confusing enough understanding how federation works for the less technically inclined. I don't think we should also expect them to figure out which instance is privacy-conscious. Privacy of votes should be baked into Lemmy. Even kbin users shouldn't be able to see it.

If users want to advertise their approval/disapproval of posts they can use public comments in tandem with private votes.
- Privacy of votes should be baked into Lemmy. Even kbin users shouldn’t be able to see it.
  
  This is impossible. The underlying protocol, ActivityPub does not have the concept of private votes. It is not up to Lemmy to decide. You'd need to revise the protocol for this and good luck with that.

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.

Votes are public in the underlying protocol - mbin users and lemmy admins can see votes. They are not anonymous. This is only about whether votes should be displayed in Lemmy.
- Yes I know, I said "should".

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

Mods of communities can already see votes in communities they moderate. Admins of instances can already see votes on all content.
- Mods of communities can already see votes in communities they moderate
  
  I moderate a few communities, ~~and I don't believe this is the case.~~
  
  Edit: It would appear that I am a little behind the times...
Already happening
akwardtheturtle

Now there's a name I haven't heard in a while....

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

I think the change would make it accessible to non-admin users
hypothetically, I suppose it could alternately be done by instances just federating the number of votes from their instance and only storing who voted what internally. Though then you might get issues with very easy vote manipulation if a server just says a lot of people voted a certain way without needing to make accounts to "justify" the fake votes.

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

Asymmetrical visibly of votes is more problematic than letting everyone see them

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Votes are already public. This isn't a change

Yeah. Just look from a kbin instance, or if you host your own instance, ~~you can run a Postgres query to find them~~ there's a dropdown in the web interface to see who voted on a post/comment.
How are votes public? Someone’s been carpet-bombing my comments lately. I’d love to know who it is.
- TheLowestStone at lemmy dot world DarkDecay at lemmy dot world
- Servers can see who voted on what, even if the vote is on another server.
  
  So if you view the vote from a server that makes the views public (like a kbin server) or you run your own Lemmy server, then you can see it.
- The easiest way to to take a look through a kbin/mbin instance, which exposes the vote information through the interface for everyone. The harder but equally valid way is to run your own Lemmy instance. Other instances will tell yours exactly who voted for what, and as an admin, you even get an option on Lemmy's web interface to see it.

I think they should be public. They’re already accessible for mbin posts and anyone administrating a lemmy instance. It should be clear to all users that their votes are already not private.

Someone could make a lemmy instance just to get voting behavior and make a website with cool graphs and stuff today and the only thing that could stop them is defederation. If Lemmy gets popular, this is just an inevitability.

Imagine if a large instance decided to do that today. Imagine if lemmy.world released lemmy.world/votes. Would people defederate just for that? Remember: Mbin already displays scores and I don’t think anyone has defederated over it.

Might as well put it on the interface so everyone understands it isn’t private. Rip off the bandaid.

Exactly. If private votes were intended, Lemmy servers would have had voting privacy setting where the vote is federated as @privacy-vote-{sha256sum userid & postid}@instance.foo instead of the actual voter's username.
- Not privacy-protecting. You can easily deduct the voter by enumeration.
I agree that it's bad that there's a false impression of privacy, but I think it would be better to allow this as an extension or something and not include it as a feature in the UI, or at least not on by default. That way people who otherwise wouldn't bother won't be tempted to drive themselves crazy looking for imaginary enemies.

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.

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

Or even per community, or even per user, the latter in a similar fashion from how that video platform works, showing some of the people who liked your video, but hides these who set their likes to be hidden, bc you can set whether to publicize your "Liked videos" or not.

No.

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.

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

Make it optional and opt-in.

Do not want.

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.

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.

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

I have been considering building it into PieFed, if votes became public. There would be a pool of 1000+ bot accounts which will vote on behalf of anyone who wants it. When a vote is cast one of the proxies would be randomly chosen to federate the vote instead.
- User's votes anonymization through this system looks quite nice for me.
- I have this brilliant original idea, scroll down, and here you & @[email protected] are…
  
  I was thinking an app like Voyager could help vote from a non-posting account. Maybe it’d need to route through a proxy to better obscure the connection between a posting and non-posting account. Seeing PieFed, suppose you could try that route instead but your idea might be more secure. Folks just have to trust you I suppose hehe. Maybe one could build greater trust with a Lemmy app (Voyager) than an instance (PieFed) if they proved the app kept stuff private locally, or am I wrong?
- I like the idea - if the lemmy devs do implement public voting I'd definitely move over. Not only does it maintain the (current) state of voter visibility, but it also protects from the frequently cited admin and kbin/mbin exploits. Trusting one admin is far easier than trusting every admin.
  
  I was actually having similar thoughts after reading the post (forking lemmy) but idk if I have the time to run an instance.
- Please don't man, that makes matter even worst.
Literally what Ill do if this happens. One account that gets no notifications posts no content and votes, then another account where I comment.

This kills the Lemmy.

I say make them public. It was like that on Kbin and it never brought trouble.

You know what this feature is really useful for? Seeing who upvotes spammers to preemptively block them. Admittedly, I haven't had much of a use for that aspect since kbin.social died, but it was neat while it lasted.

Sorry, what's an upvote spammer and why are they undesirable?
- Op is talking about accounts that upvote spam content. For the most part those accounts will be the spammer's alts that will be posting spam when the current account gets banned. Blocking them while they are still being used for vote manipulation means you wouldn't have to see their spam in the future.
Someone mentioned something similar in the GitHub thread, suggesting that this should only be available to mods or admins. I thought it was reasonable.
To spam on here I suppose it’d be good to try to start a popular community on your own instance and then see who usually reports and downvotes spam, then block them from accounts you plan to use to astroturf or otherwise send spam.

Sigh

I think they should focus more on getting rid of bots, and get a little less ban happy on the people that are calling out bots or bullshit.

I'd love to see what mod removed content or banned someone.

I dont see the issue letting people see them. They are already public making it more accessible just increases equallity.

absolutely a horrible idea. please for the love of god don't do this, it will only lead to people getting dunked on for how they upvote/downvote.

either way id still shit out my ass

Boosting a Lemmy post in Mastodon shows up as an upvote in Lemmy. So the two concepts seem to be coupled in the activitypub substructure. I don't see how upvotes would be secret then, as I don't think it's possible to boost something privately on Mastodon.

arent they already though?

Nah I’ll fuck off.

While I don't necessarily think that votes should be made public, it would be nice if you could see your own votes. There have been a few times I wanted to find a post that I had seen, but didn't save, and I couldn't find it.

I was of the assumption they were private. Please make them private then because I want no one looking at my votes

Absolutely braindead consideration by the devs. I'll be quitting Lemmy if/when this is pushed through. Unbelievably stupid.

Baked in visibility of votes and blocking that only works one way makes Lemmy (and anything based on ActivityPub) less functional from an end user standpoint. Wish I knew a decent, somewhat popular alternative that implemented these features

Maybe a model where upvotes and downvotes can per instance be federated either publicly or aggregated? So an instance admin could choose to bundle together the vote totals and push them to other instances and it would just show the total number of votes on comments and posts by people on their server rather than the individuals. And if a federated server acts up and sends bad vote totals, the instance could be blocked for it as a trade off.

The underlying protocol, ActivityPub has no support for aggregated votes.

if a federated server acts up and sends bad vote totals, the instance could be blocked for it as a trade off.

How would you detect this? It seems very hard.

I thought they were already???

Like how/why wouldn’t they be public? Even if the data isn’t readily accessible via a gui it’s gotta be somewhere so that federation works. Unless you’ve been thirsty in your main it shouldn’t be a problem?

Am I missing something?

I think the best way to think about this is in terms of "affordances" of the platform and the balance of their merits. "Affordances" just mean the actions and behaviours enabled by the platform's features (a jargon-y but useful word I've seen others use in these discussions).

Broader principles like privacy are important too, but I think can easily lead to less productive and relevant discussions, in part because many of the counters or complications will come down to the actual affordances.

The biggest affordance is obvious: more polarisation & abusive/antagonistic behaviour

From what I've read so far, I think everyone shares a pretty clear understanding of what public votes will lead to ... a more heated and polarising dynamic, with potential abuse vectors opening up, and less honesty and openness in voting. And I think most share a distaste for that scenario. Either way, I do, and I'd encourage others to think about how it's likely result of public votes and with the internet being the internet, is unlikely to be pleasant or fruitful.

Specific people having access doesn't decide the matter

While others have access to vote data, namely admins of instances, mods (for their communities) and members of platforms that make votes public like k/mbin, I don't think this is decisive.

It's about the behaviours that are being enabled and the balance of behaviours and how they interact to form community dynamics, with the fediverse itself being an important factor. An admin or mod having access to votes is part of making their job easier, which is a good thing. It's power and responsibility. And the moment they violate the bounds of their role by "doxing" someone's voting data, that'd obviously be a bad thing, but with countermeasures we can take. We can leave their instance or community and our instance can defederate from them ... their account can be blocked and possibly banned by admins. On balance, this seems stable and fair enough to me.

In the case of other platforms, like k/mbin, that's definitely more tricky. But again, defederation is always a possibility here if it becomes problematic enough (however dramatic that could end up). This is just the nature of the fediverse, that platforms will differ on things like this. Again, if people start abusing that information from other platforms and instances, blocking, banning are options, as is the nuclear option of defederation with any such instances (which is a core balancing feature of the fediverse).

As it presently stands, k/mbin are a minority of users on the threadiverse and so whatever their platform choices are don't really affect the rest of the threadiverse.

In the end, you can only make the best platform that you can. That k/mbin do something we don't want to do isn't a good reason for following suite. If anything, it's a good reason to stick with what we prefer and continue to make the argument with them on their choices.

Privacy and transparency are relevant but not decisive

I agree it's an issue that it seems votes are private when they aren't. Again, I come back to the balance of affordances, and I think they're better as they are than with public votes. However misleading the privacy situation is, it can be handled by being more transparent with users by providing warnings etc.

Ultimately, the privacy problem on the fediverse is not going away any time soon ... it's the nature of decentralisation, and this should maybe be made more clear to more people! But making a better platform is a real problem in front of us right now and I think it's better to focus on that than how the general issue of privacy or consistency with privacy is best served.

Other platforms aren't that relevant

I think I saw someone mentioning in the GitHub dicussion that other platforms expose vote data. While true, many of those would be microblogging platforms (mastodon, twitter, bluesky etc), where, again, the balance of affordances becomes relevant. A "vote" there, normally called a "like" is a personal action between user accounts that are likely to follow each other with such being the core mechanic of the platform. On aggregators like lemmy/reddit, the core mechanic is making popular posts so that your content gets to the top of the feed (roughly anyway). While there's a lot of overlap, there's more angst here around what gets voted on and what doesn't and less inter-personal accountability and bonding. Posts and discussions are more public affairs and less conversations between people.

Technical can of worms

I wonder if making votes public would create the need or desire for enabling more post-specific options for users, such as making a post that can't be voted on or that doesn't provide public voting data?

What about the children!!

In the end, my bet would be that at the scale that lemmy is at, it won't make too much of a difference if votes were made public. I think some would definitely encounter more unpleasantness and some would definitely find voting a more stressful affair, but we're cosy enough that we'll cope. Going forward though, public voting for an aggregator feels dangerous and hard to undo. Yes, it could be technically removed, but if a culture is established that is accustomed to it and become desensitised to the negatives, they'll probably want to hold on to it.

I agree with just about everything you said, except that it won't be a technical can of worms to implement the change according to the devs.
- Oh, I was more talking about the technicalities of doing anything that might become desirable once votes are public, such as opting-in to having your votes hidden or having a particular post’s votes hidden or whatever else may come out in response.

Already had one person today mention my down votes .

It didn't validate their argument at all and without context it can be interpreted in any fashion to make it seem malicious

So, federated network advantages here: you can always modify your instance's hosting code to patch this out, at least for the users on your instance.

What you cannot do is prevent other federated instances from publishing the votes submitted to content on their instance. But if you're accessing that content through your local instance, they can modify the upvote button to pop up a dialog saying something like: "The instance that hosts this content has elected to make usernames visible for upvote/downvote. Would you still like to vote?"

Personally: In many ways I don't mind. I'm on the internet with my real name. I don't mind being accountable for my behaviour online. I might be a little more cautious about upvoting something controversial or NSFW, but largely it wouldn't change my behaviour.

I just hope my app hides them

That’s creepy

I'm down for more transparency. Lets make them public!

I support this.

Do you think it's a reaction to Twitter (X) making likes private?
- I wonder if they're aware, actually. From the linked issue:
  
  Also noteworthy is that reddit and lemmy are unique in keeping vote privacy: mastodon, twitter, and most other platforms expose them.
  
  What voting system on Twitter is he talking about?
Me too.

They simply want to police it better to suit their agenda

admins and owners of any federated instance can already see votes.

My posts and comments are already exposed, so it seems like it would make sense to make votes public as well. I think it contributes to the general spirit of the platform.

Based on the comment, it seems there's more opposition toward visible downvote than upvote, so maybe dev should just make upvote visible and not downvote?

There's more talk about how bad visible downvote is and no one seems to talk about the upvote lol.

This is how it is in mbin. Well, over at the instance I'm using at least.

I find it amusing sometimes, because I can see whether posts have been liked from Mastodon or other services. Gives some insight into how interconnected we really are.

I guess over at Lemmy you can't currently tell if your post is boosted by a Mastodon user. Sometimes they are, and in theory they can kind of live a life of their own from there on. It's fun to be able to see when it happens.

Sure, but I think we can go further.

Filter the votes I see based on which users or instances I've blocked. I've blocked them for a reason.

I'm split, but I lean slightly towards no. On one hand, it could be good for discoverability, and it would help my efforts to make a client-side algorithm

On the other hand, it will make one of Lemmy's problems worse - engagement. Some people will vote less, and it's already feeling a little quieter around here as the numbers settled after the Reddit Exodus. I doubt it'll be a massive change, but a .5% decrease in voting, permanently, could make a difference

Ultimately, you can see it on federated platforms, so shrug

You could make a client or browser add-on or something that just uses a separate account for all your voting.

I would like the option to make it public on my community. I have asked people not to downvote amateur bakers for just trying to improve their skills but some assholes don't listen.

A community specific downvote disabling would be pretty nice for this occasion.
- True. Disabling downvotes would make a whole lot more sense than making them public and shame people who use them.
This I miss from the public downvotes in kbin.social. It was a great way to weed out people i don't need as part of my internet experience.

That'd be nice.

There are merits for it and against it. My biggest concerns would be privacy regarding data scrapers .

Regarding poor behavior, I really think that ultimately comes down to moderation on the platform. I've only had a few poor experiences but I am also someone who sometimes sees certain threads as dumpster fires and refrains from joining in or refrains from responding when I feel there isn't any form of discussion or chatter to be had. I can understand that it likely happens more often than not but I also believe that moderation is the only reasonable way of curbing it. Moderation teams have to make it clear that the behavior is not welcome and that it will be dealt with.

Allow it to be configurable by server or community. Some communities may benefit from allowing the public or mods to see votes, while others would be hurt by it.

mods already see votes
- And that should probably be configurable

I support opening up vote logs to moderators in their own communities. Voting records add useful context to the nature of the exchanges happening, eg. if two people are having a back and forth, but neither is downvoting the other, it contextualizes the disagreement as less hostile.

I don't think it's a good idea to give every new user the burden of using that information responsibly. A minority would use it to retaliate, stalk, and harass, and there would be too many of them to reasonably hold them accountable.

Generally speaking, you shouldn't do anything on the internet that you absolutely don't want to become public. If you don't want people to know your votes, don't vote.

Having seen the complete absence of mayhem on kbin caused by vote visibility, the absolute and utter nothing that will come of this decision leads me to say yeah, sure. That said, I’d prefer improved mod tools over this, but option c isn’t listed.

In my opinion this setting should be set by the use. Whether they want their votes to be shown to public. If they deny Lemmy would just show "upvoted by anon" or something.

That is not possible. The underlying protocol, ActivityPub does not have a concept of private votes. This is not up to Lemmy to decide.
- Yeah, I think the ActivityPub standard doesn't have a concept of votes at all. They're not defined in the first place.

There's an easy solution. Dump and create new accounts every week or month or whatever fits your needs. Backup and move your data if you want (lemmy's data import doesn't work well with big data though).

Just like changing your password routinely increases your security, new online identity gives you privacy.

Fuck yea lets go, then the petty people involved in discussions can see I'm not even bothering to down vote their idiocy.

"That dude downvoted a cute cat pic, get 'im!"

This is a copy and past from my reply another community, sorry if you are reading it again:

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.

They basically already are, if you run an instance. Might as well make it easier.

They say twitter shows public voting but I thought Musk just anonymized likes on twitter because it was getting transphobes in trouble?

I vote for public votes. Your comments, history and activity is already public, what can you gain from "hidden" votes as much as privacy?

seems trivial to check for a login/subscribed etc. then increment up//down votes. why link each vote to an account in public? maybe for mods an account(s) to be banned for botting votes?

I can't read Chinese, so I'm not sure what good seeing their names would be. A downvote is a downvote.

I have continuous doubts if a grandiose tankie with nick after Jean-Jacques Dessalines can exhibit any grown up behaviour. It’s like 15 year old pretending for a while to be all democratic and responsible but who knows what’s in that narc edgy head.

Still, undoubtedly it will be a fun ride whatever happens

Didn't kbin have a separate mechanism for supporting a post in a more public way? I can't remember how that worked now, but it was in addition to the regular voting I think?

Kbin has upvote, downvote, and boost. Boost comes from the microblogging side, kbin does both content aggregation like Lemmy and microblogging like Mastodon. On the content aggregation side boost counts as 2 upvotes and it functions as normal for the microblogging side. Kbin.social is the only Kbin instance I used, I expect that it works the same on other Kbin instances and on Mbin but I don't know for sure.
- I use MBin and it works pretty much as you described, it has upvote (similar to Mastodon like) and boost (similar to Mastodon repost)
  
  Both upvotes and boosts are public on Mbin, but downvotes aren't (to prevent harassment)
It's called 'boosting' and I believe mbin kept it as well.
- Yeah. It's the repost functionality common on Mastodon.
  
  Back on Kbin.social I would have some followers from Mastodon, and when I saw a neat comment I would sometimes boost it and thereby push it straight to their feeds.
  
  Same thing would work on Mbin, except that i don't have followers. Oh well, I still boost posts I find neat.

I really don't care about what any of you think, so go for it. Perhaps better discussion will come from it. And I'd like to block users with consistent negative behaviours.

The problem is if YOU choose to vote something, and a powermod admin dislikes your choice, they can, and do, ban people from many communities on that alone.
- Admin can already see your vote.
And I’d like to block users with consistent negative behaviours.

This is where I'm at it with it. Votes are already public to those who really want to see them and that cat's not going back in the bag. Anyone that goes out of their way to inject it into the conversation is showing their ass and adding a (likely extra) level of toxicity that blocking would fix.
They can already do that and you have the modlog to prove your innocence.

It matters very little to me if votes are made public. It's not even a top 20 reason I'm a Lemmy user.

Edited for clarity. I should have tea before I post.......

Yes this should have been done already. Reddit it's structured the way it is to better serve the manipulative intentions of the company behind it. Another useful thing would be to have votes on each user profile to flag bots easily. Bots are a threat to this platform, extreme transparency is one way to counter them the other is to add restrictions.

I think it should stay private

I never said blocking people is an unreasonable option. That's something you just made up so that you could give your little speech.

I'm pointing out that it's very strange that when I bring up away this is going to obviously be abused pure knee-jerk reaction is to say ' why didn't you just block them' as if it's already happened.

Now to the matter at hand... What is the point of this? Why do users need this information? Every argument for it on the GitHub seems to only apply to things moderators need to know

Go a step further,

Make it mandatory to comment if you vote.

!I don't really mean this, but could you imagine?!<

Hard yes from me, thank you.

I think votes should be displayed publicly at the bottom of the comments section for each post. Make people stand by their convictions.

ITT: Lots of people who have no idea how the tech works and couldn't be bothered reading the comments before posting

Why not try it, then remove the feature if it turns out toxic?

Would be cool

There are a lot of arguments about social pressuring users into voting a certain way. But not having votes public also leads to a lot of vote manipulation. Especially from the Hasbro's.

Lemmy is a lot like the early days of the internet right now. Very easy to abuse and mostly running on users not doing so. Bot accounts will start being a bigger and bigger issue with the growth and Lemmy so there needs to be a way to combat this.

Votes are also already not private as many users said. Just by running an instance one can see all the votes.

I'm genuinely thrilled by how many here are wetting themselves at the thought of others knowing what or who they downvoted. That is really the extent of "privacy" awareness in most of this thread, wanting to get away with being dicks.

Downvotes are meant to balance out "likes", and minimise people gaming the score system — but let's be honest here, just as often they're a "disagree" button. And sometimes they're just bullying tools — an endless supply of "Kick me!" post-its to be distributed generously wherever.

Hot fix: end downvotes. Just yank them out of the system. Actually my preferred solution.

More realistic fix: make votes transparent, encourage accountability.

Yes make it public.

No real reason not to.

If this mean we'd be able to see who has up- / downvoted a comment on our own and possibly on other people's posts then I'm all for it. This would be highly useful at filtering out the people here I want nothing to do with.

For my community ( [email protected] ) I would adore this as long as it's available to Mods of the community the downvotes are in and Admins of that instance only. It should absolutely not be visible for normal users.

We are hit with downvotes nearly every time we post a new thread on anything even remotely controversial so it would really help us filter out people who simply downvote to bury the thread and contribute nothing whatsoever to the discussion.

If you disagree, we want to know why and discuss that with you. It's the entire point of our Community.

Heck, we actively made it a rule to not downvote unless the user is not adding to the discussion, and that it should not be used as a disagree button. People generally ignore this, however.

That or just add the moderator option to disable downvotes for Communities. It would be an incredibly handy toggle.

EDIT: For an example as to why it should be implemented, see this post you're currently viewing where I give reasons, how it's been impacting us, some alternatives, and people hit the "fuck you" button with zero discussion and that's all. This is the problem.

I support this. I want to know who keeps downvoting my posts. They just need to allow a way to ban them from the community without needing to comment first.

The people complaining about privacy have it fucked up imho.

Lemmy wasn't built for privacy. It was built to combat censorship and they are not synonymous. Again, imo hiding any sort of public engagement or impressions is just more censorship.

To simplify my point, were all here to engage with one another, so unless your being an asshole or aren't living up to your own values whatcha gotta hide?

Doo ettt

Get rid of votes.

They only rank replies and posts as content, which is only useful for advertising or providing a platform without ads that hooks into the same antisocial behaviors that an ad revenue driven one would.

They also discourage replies, promote groupthink and provide a vector for abuse.

Get rid of votes. You’re not on reddit anymore, you don’t have to be a redditor .

Yes, absolutely. I am for pseudonyms but transparency. I would be very keen on having colors of the usernames to signify how old the username is. Also having a possibility to load block lists from files ( like github ) to allow sharing the block lists of the trolls

Showing upvoters and removing downvotes completely!!

People downvote totally harmless posts and comments, just because they have a different opinion.

This useless and contraproductive negativity is the reason why YouTube removed downvotes and many other platforms never offered such a feature.

For this user base it is the right answer. So many petty downvoters. On my site I'm considering a rule that would make it so you can't be the vote that casts a comment into the negative without giving a reason, and then that reason would be turned into a comment. If something is worth downvoting then it is worth explaining why someone is wrong. If you can't do that maybe you shouldn't downvote. I don't think you should have to do that every time. But if a comment is going to go negative someone should step up to the plate and bother to articulate. That way a comment can't get hidden away from the public just because a petty mob that can't even present an argument sees it as convenient if certain information disappears.

So in that case the downvoter who crossed it into the negative would not be anonymous.

I say yes!!

I have a particular set of people that actually follow me from community to community, just to downvote what I say and the articles I post. All because I posted a neutral article about the Green Party to the c/politics sub. That made them mad enough to be obsessed about me. lol

So if you are determined enough to do that, then ya shouldn't be upset that people can see what you're doing.

You don’t, you just pretend that you do.
- Hey, wow! What a coincidence. Funny that YOU of all people, would show up at the EXACT time I am talking about people following me. Crazy coincidence, don't ya think?
  
  It'd be super fun to see who it is following me and downvoting me, right? I mean, not that YOU'D ever do that, right? All because I posted a Green Party article to a politics sub. You suuuurrreee wouldn't be the type of person to do that, I bet! Right?
Yeah, but then what?

So you have confirmed that you have a fan club that likes to downvote you. What would you even do with this info?
- Once you know the accounts doing it, you can block them so they can't interact with your posts anymore.
- Well I'd call them out on it and ask why they feel the need to do that.
  
  Maybe, just maybe, if they know people could see how obsessive they are, it would take the fun out of the stalking.
  
  I mean, at the end of the day, I don't care THAT much one way or the other. I just think it would be funny to give them a shoutout and welcome them to another round of downvoting.
  
  I posted an article about a ninety-year-old woman being the oldest person to graduate from Illinois University. 9 downvotes within one minute of posting it. lmao
  
  Right now they are laughing and rubbing their hands together when I post something, just so they can downvote it. Which is funny and sad. Like am I really that important?! lol
  
  So public or not public, I don't care, but we can vote for, I'd say yes.
  
  But I won't cry if Lemmy doesn't make the votes public. And I doubt there will be many Lemmy users that want their votes public, so I don't think it's gonna happen.
Wow I want my obsessed about me haters too. Where are you people
- Wow I want my obsessed about me haters too. Where are you people
  
  Go post an article about the Green Party into the c/politics sub. Not only will you get plenty of people following you to downvote, but you'll get called a "russian troll farm employee" every single day. So double win!!