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.

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.

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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.

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

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?

It would be nice to be able to have a view that only tallies the votes from your local server, but IDK about listing all the individuals in an easily accessible manner.

What I really want though is a rolling deletion of my activity that’s older than 3-6 months. I understand there’s no way to erase these things entirely, especially from decentralized servers, but I do wish the internet could revert to being a little more ephemeral. You can also go look through public records and go back years in real life, but it’s not easy.

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

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

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.

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…

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

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

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 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.