this post was submitted on 04 Jun 2025
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That depend, what your are trying to achieve.
Your point is valid. PieFed point of view is also valid. There are circumtance where voting is better private than transparency. As for myself, i would completly remove the voting system because it is useless.
Why are you voting ? Do you like the cat picture ? The article ? The title ? We will never know. So what's the point of voting since we don't know its reasons ?
Why it is at the top of my timeline ? And what about minorities ? Let's imagine 10 deafs people 1000 hearing people. If ya 1000 hearing people downvote a post because you don't want to see a post with sign language...
Don't overcomplicate this. Voting is a way to collectively curate content. If it is relevant to the community and you feel the content is a positive addition to the community, you vote up. If you think it's a negative addition, you vote it down. That's all that there is to it.
I never downvoted any posts, you may check my alts. I don't do that. I simply ignore or tell users or repport.
Voting like this is a bit of a dark pattern, though. Especially downvotes. They come from places where the platform owners want to download the responsibility of community management to the community itself. This has a nasty tendency to silence valid criticism while simultaniously supporting brigading behaviour.
At the very least, we should be having serious, design-focused discussions about eliminating or highly restricting downvotes.
StackOverflow solved this specific issue pretty well IMO. Each downvote costs you a reputation/karma/fake-internet-point. Lemmy doesn't count karma, so that'd a bit of a nonstarter, but for systems that do, that feels like a good way to discourage rampant use of downvotes.