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this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2024
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askchapo
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An average user absolutely benefits from being able to see who voted on a post or comment and what their vote was. A person noticing that someone is actively down voting their content in a deliberate way empowers the user to have it dealt with. Mods might not queue into that kind of targeted harassment.
All these comments comparing a vote on Lemmy to a vote within a democratic election are incredibly juvenile frankly. Its reductionist when saying Electoralism is equivalent to a Lemmy Vote and egotistical when saying a Lemmy Vote is equivalent to a ballot cast in a democratic election.
Your vote isn't private in either case regardless. At most you need to know someone's birthday, first name, and last name to find someone's voting record in America (might depend state by state). Someone willing to set up a Lemmy instance to see your votes is also capable of then setting up bots to specifically target you with down votes, which is the more egregious of the two actions.
Given the ease in which someone could create a bot network for the purpose of targeting someone or a group of people with a downvote campaign, I think it's only just to allow regular users the power to see votes and act on that information. Why should this information be gate kept to only the technically capable?
Keeping votes "hidden" maintains a kind of voyeuristic experience for those with the power or technical knowledge and resources while maintaining this illusion of privacy for the masses.
Make them visible to all.
Well I guess it's ok then if America does it
America doesn't "do it", its a flaw of its democratic institution not a feature. For someone to invoke the privacy of their electoral vote with out acknowledging that, at least here, its not even private just exposes the writer as unserious.
To equate a vote on the bear form to voting for a representative is deeply unserious. Here there is only vote or don't vote, it's not even a question of downvoting and its implications.
The reality is the votes are already not private on the greater platform. By not showing the votes to users the platform is giving a smoke screen for vote harassment.
Electoral votes are private in essentially all elections. The existence of an exception doesn't change the fact that most people have an expectation of privacy while voting. This clearly extends to internet forums or else we wouldn't be having this conversation.
It is also possible to tally your total upvotes but the developers made a conscious decision for the site not to display this information. This is a lesson learned from reddit where you can observe toxic behavior from people trying to increase their karma score. It doesn't matter that you could technically do this on lemmy, you don't see the behavior because the design doesn't encourage it by default.
Why does reddit and until now lemmy not show voting history? It's a lesson learned from digg where showing vote history results in tit for tat voting blocks where essentially no posts could rise organically on their own merits. The fact that moderators can see vote history already allows action against vote harassment without the possibility for voting blocks to emerge. Again it doesn't matter if some nerd can technically find a way to view the votes, without it being part of the default design the voting blocks won't naturally emerge as they did on digg.
So I guess removing public likes and retweets on Twitter was a good move and not in service of protecting users from exposing themselfs as Nazis then.
Digg is almost what, 20+ years old? That's almost three generations of platforms ago, we exist in a federated environment where each instance has it's own ecosystem and can selectively block entire swaths of the platform on ideological grounds or for petty reasons. Hell, users can block whole instances now. Were well beyond tit for tat spit spats over vote history at this point.
Yes.
Yes.
These are not even in the same universe. The only reason people expect that they are private is because they're private on reddit. They're private on reddit because reddit needs too be able to juice or squash front page content using their fuzzy vote counters.
Reddit having public updogs would have given the whole game away. I remember when reddit didn't have a fuzzy vote counter and they quietly rolled it out. People we're not happy about it because it meant more opacity on the platform. It made it harder to know if people we're breggading posts and subs. People questioned the votes constantly.