I mod a few communities and I can now see who has upvoted or downvoted any comment or post in the community.
You’d think any mod would like that data being available to find any issue user. But I feel like invasive with this.
I know admins have long been able to see this data.
Also its not like its personally information, just your screen name associated with your own activity, as your posts and comments are. But the passive act of voting is now very public which is a bit icky to me.
How do you all feel about this?
I’m sorry I haven’t been super active on Lemmy and missed much of the conversation around this. I’ll go find any relevant discussions too.
You can read the github comments on this question
Long story short: The overwhelming consensus is that ppl prefer their votes to be private, but to avoid targeted vote manipulation (which is pretty common now unfortunately), votes in lemmy are semi-private: only visible to admins and mods, but not to the majority of users.
Votes have always been public though? Nothing about the fediverse is private or secure. It’s that way by design. This just makes some features easier to access.
True, but some UI decisions can make good behavior easier, or unhealthy behavior harder. Even if downvotes are technically public already, I think it’s a good idea to at least have a little bit of a barrier up, to make it less tempting to check. Having to manually go to lemvotes provides a decent barrier.
This is the first I’ve heard about it (I’m on piefed myself), but I don’t think it’s a good idea. People will get snippier when they have this info available to them.
They’re visible on other fedi platforms, making it trivially easy for assholes to go looking for who downvoted them anyway. The illusion of safety is a dereliction of duty to users.
Also, downvotes exist to allow large social sites to give the illusion of moderation and user agency while ignoring their duty to actually manage their spaces. They’re not needed here, and their existence promotes excessively large and unmanageable communities where people shout into voids and engage with hostility rather than discuss topics with people. Their use and inclusion should be seriously reconsidered.
I agree that it’s good to let users know that their votes are public, but I think it would be better to just tell them that (kind of like how Mastodon says “heads up, DMs are not encrypted”) and not by also giving them easy access to that information. Simply because if it’s easier for more people to do, then more people will be tempted to do it.
I definitely agree that downvotes should be reconsidered entirely. It’s basically outsourcing moderation duties to the users, not to mention that people will always incorrectly use it as a “disagree” button.
