Currently, almost anyone in the Fediverse can see Lemmys votes. Lemmy admins can see votes, as well as mods. Only regular Lemmy users can’t. Should the Lemmy devs create a way to make the votes anonymous?
There is a discussion going on right now considering “making the Lemmy votes public” but I think that premisse is just wrong. The votes are public already, they’re just hidden from Lemmy users. Anyone from a kbin/mbin/fedia instance can check out the votes if they are so inclined.
The users right now may fall into a false sense of privacy when voting because the votes are hidden from Lemmy users. If you want to vote something and not show up on the vote list, please create another account to support that type of content and don’t tell anyone.
I’ve been thinking about this for several hours since I first became aware of the debate.
I don’t care that much in theory if anyone sees my votes. They aren’t anything I’m particularly private about. I care about conversation way more than up/down votes.
However, some people get a little upset about being downvoted. I think it will result in retaliatory downvotes. You already see that when two folks are arguing. I don’t normally waste my time downvoting a post I’m writing a rebuttal to, but when they are downvoting me I tend to do it back. I think if everyone had easy access, they would hunt down their down voters posts and retaliate regardless of the quality of the comments.
Lastly, I wonder if this will give rise to a client that lets you use one account to post/comment and a different one to vote. And if it does, will that be better all around? Then no one will be able to associate votes with a user. But it seems unnecessarily wasteful to create a whole account that does nothing but vote. It seems like it would deny mods (and everyone) a useful tool for identifying bad actors.
Technically, anyone could get access to the voters identity if they try hard enough but 99% of the users won’t put in that much effort. And technically someone could already use different accounts for different activities, but without reason to create a client to support that it’s too much of a pain to be worth the effort.
So I really think I’m on team status quo here.
That would stop as soon as people start reporting this behavior to mods who felt enabled to ban users based on unjustified downvoting.
I’m really skeptical about that. Either that they would do it or that such “justified” downvoting would be a clear cut or fair decision. Most people don’t vote the right way. How many people downvote content they agree with or find funny but doesn’t add to the discussion? How many people upvote content they disagree with that does add to the discussion?
And am I really going to take up a mod’s time because someone got mad at me and downvoted—the most accessible and innocuous way to express displeasure with someone? How many more complaints about downvote bullying are mods going to have to field?
I don’t know. You could be right, but I’d want to see it successful in a small scale, if possible, before deploying it everywhere. Maybe the folks suggesting it should be up to the server admin are right. That would be another differentiator and people could go to communities on servers that have their preferred visibility policy. That would serve as an A/B test and let people vote with their feet.
Again, this is only a problem because we have lost this sense of shared culture. If we really want to have an established “community”, these guidelines will have to be one way or another be restored and enforced.
Here is an idea: instead of trying to remove power from people, let’s give more of it. Hiding votes is hard, but creating a finer-grained permission system for moderation is not. Let’s build a system where mods can assign other mods for specific types of reports. Then, we can have few mods who would be “all powerful” like they are now and we could have a bunch of “issue-specific” trusted users who could access/triage specific reports.
We shouldn’t need mods to figure out what is “basic” spam and we shouldn’t need powerful mods to say “user A is reporting that B has downvoted their last 5 posts in different conversations. This is a violation of the community rules and therefore should be banned.”