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…

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.

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.

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

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 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?

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

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.

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.

Hard yes from me, thank you.

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

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

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.

That’s creepy