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.

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[–] Coelacanth@feddit.nu 110 points 3 weeks ago (8 children)

I always thought anonymous voting was preferable, or at least non-public. I don't want "why did you downvote me bro!?"-arguments to occur, and I don't want to know who approves of my comments or not. I think thinking of votes as an amorphous blob representing general public opinion on Lemmy is preferable to getting into the weeds of who exactly likes your posts and comments.

We could also have "karma" on Lemmy, but while technically tracked the environment is better off without it being public in my opinion. I view voting records similarly.

If botting becomes enough of an issue that regular users need to report vote manipulation bots I'll be fine with conceding my stance.

[–] Quetzalcutlass@lemmy.world 5 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

We could also have "karma" on Lemmy, but while technically tracked the environment is better off without it being public in my opinion. I view voting records similarly.

It's strange that they removed total account karma visibility a while back but are now thinking about making votes public.

I think a good compromise (since Lemmy already tracks that data) would have been to show the upvote/downvote ratio a user receives on their profile page, without showing their total karma. That'd help you spot toxic users without incentivising karma whoring.

Similarly, a display of how often a user upvotes versus downvotes others would help spot bots and trolls without completely obliterating privacy like their suggestion would.

(But ultimately none of this solves the problem of privacy on the Fediverse being one federated bad actor away from nonexistence)

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