this post was submitted on 19 Oct 2023
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The best way to fuck a democratic process up is making votes public. No one should feel like there's a "deterrent" to voting. All that does is create incentive to reward/punish people for how they vote.
Voting is what fuels the content aggregation, too. It is a very bad idea to deter people from voting how they please because it strangles the algorithm of the data it needs to sort the content. You want people voting, a lot. That's what makes the whole thing work.
Edit: which is to say nothing of how bad it will get when people make tools that help automate retaliation for downvotes. You can potentially state an opinion in a comment and set up a bot to auto block every downvoter, then share that list publicly. You may think that sounds like a great system for weeding out hate but I promise you it's going to be far messier than that, and more importantly, this kind of retaliatory shit hurts the aggregation even more.
Votes on lemmy are inherently public, due to how federation works.
The US is based on Federalism and we don’t make our votes public
Votes are public on Lemmy, in the sense that if you have admin access to an instance that is federated you will be able to find who upvoted which posts/comments in the database.
That should really be changed so that you can only see the cumulative votes from any given instance and only a user's specific instance will have records of their individual upvotes and downvotes.
That would make pushing posts to the top via botting way too easy, and far harder to detect. Federation is intentionally set up so that instances do not trust each other.
IIRC ~~Kbin recently removed the ability~~ to show who faved/unfavved a post for Lemmy instances.
Edit: guess they did not 🤦
I swear there was discussion about hiding faves coming from lemmy... guess they decided not to. At least you can still follow people and see who else is following them... 🤦
It's pretty easy to spin up a temporary instance in a VM.
Since upvoting is most of what I do, I think it's great that people can see it was me who upvoted them.
I don't mind the accountability of a downvote at all. If I didn't craft a specific reply, it lets people know who to ask if they genuinely don't understand why their content was problematic.
Shhh dont give them ideas
You misread. What I wrote:
Voting and weaponizing downvotes are two very different things.
To be clear, I used the phrase "weaponizing downvotes" to paraphrase the intent behind the written policy I quoted in full. Here it is again:
Do not engage in content manipulation such as posting spam content, vote manipulation through using several user accounts or consistently down-voting a user. Vote for the content, not for the person.
Seems like you have a problem with the policy then, because it is requiring you to self-regulate your own voting, and to specifically NOT vote as you please, but in a way that is best for the community as a whole.