p3x.deWhy are you personally against lemmy allowing users to see who upvoted/downvoted?
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ClinicallydepressedpoochieJust wish there were more transparency around counts and content engagement.
I firmly believe most influencer these day were propped up with payed views and botted engagement. Not that lemmy is the same but it all feels so dirty.
I prefer votes being semi-anonymous. The vote counts are technically public, you just have to use software that displays them, but that added barrier is enough for most people to never check and that is how I prefer it. I feel like seeing voter names just encourages getting into pissing contests about "why did you downvote me" which I don't want to happen because: A, votes don't matter and B, if someone downvoted without commenting they probably don't want to spend half an hour arguing in comments.
Bingo.
Because the reason for a vote is personal and different to everyone.
If I see a post with a title containing 20 emojis, I downvote it. Doesnโt matter the content of the post.
Now, assume that post was about fighting for lgbt rights or fighting against anti-abortion legislation. Some moral crusader sees my downvote and immediately calls me a bigot. When, from my perspective, all I did was downvote a bunch of emojis.
Take that idea and expand it.
This. One thing I couldn't stand about Reddit was seeing people who could be doing anything else with their lives, but decided it worthwhile to "background check" other posters.
This was a big thing with Twitter too.
"Oh, they follow such-and-such in their list of 10,000 follows, who turned out to be bad in recent news, so this person's views are worthless and they must also be bad!"
Like, being able to have a quick glance and be like "Ah this is clearly a bot / hate-troll / what-haves", can be handy for some sense of accountability, but purity-testing and association-mobs are the stuff of cautionary science fiction, and should be avoided.
100% agreed.
I wish people would respond to the comment, not the commenter.
I've seen it too often on Lemmy too.
Most are of what you describe, but not all of them. I have seen valuable background checks before (back on Reddit). I specifically remember an elaborate post about bots/botnet.
I don't like your dismissive qualification of "have so little going on in their lives". Some background checks are good and important. Dismissing people who are willing to invest into that in general, but also dismissing people who "have nothing better to do" for their situation, feels like an awful, uncalled-for, inappropriate insult.
*/edit: Rewording to better get my point across.*
Sorry I didn't mean to cause any offense but maybe I can clarify too. The people I'm referring to are what's referred to often as "terminally online." They could be doing anything with themselves and their lives, but instead they're choosing to deep-dive on anonymous message board posters they disagree with, so they can tear them apart or call them out for some post made years ago, or an assumed affiliation or belief, that kind of thing.
It's a choice to be vindictive and petty to people.
Like, yeah you're right, sometimes looking at post histories and such can be helpful to unmask a bot net or a troll riling up a community, but I'm referring to people doing it just to be obsessively petty and vindictive to strangers.
But okay, in good faith I'll add "decide they have nothing better to do" to emphasize one's free will, because the joke is that anybody could be doing better than trying to dig up personal beef on each other over message boards when nothing is at stake lol.
I don't have a strong opinion on the matter, but it really seems like it would encourage stalking and revenge-downvotes.
The thing about any stalking and revenge downvotes is that everybody would be able to immediately see exactly what was happening, due to the added transparency. Rules could very easily be made against this. So, when I see this argument it strikes me as a bit of a red herring.
What I think is really going on, is some people want to be able to stalk and downvote bomb without being recognized, which the current system allows.
Now I really wanna go investigate who downvoted this comment
What are you going to get out of knowing I downvoted their comment?
How would such rules work across federation?
Sure, one instance can make their rules regarding it. But if everything they federate with ignore them, do they have to exclude all federated votes? Would they have to filter all votes according to some technical-representable rules?
Hm. That's a good question. It'd be up to that specific instance owner to take action, which not all would. Though even without an applicable rule, I think the transparency alone would cut down on the behavior more than people think.
I don't love the idea that Nazis can lookup that I voted against their propaganda when it appears here.
Piefed has supposedly implemented a workaround to allow for private voting.
https://piefed.social/post/205362
Oh, neat!
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Mbin shows who upvoted, but it does not show who downvoted. Kbin used to show both, but there are no active Kbin servers anymore.
I was just thinking about kbin. It died? I signed up long ago but didnโt really use it.
First, I wasn't talking karma count, I think that is toxic.
To answer the rest, I guess I would like to have the option of seeing who voted native to the main site.
I don't like downloading apps or installing plugins.
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Mbin is a fork of Kbin, a different independent project, not Lemmy.
So, you're saying I have to change my instance? Which would be fine and I am already debating just that.
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I don't see the interest in who voted what on my stuff, but it could be interesting to do some analysis of system-wide voting behaviors. The bigger Lemmy gets the more of a problem it's going to have with bots. People will need to create tools to identify these bots, and voting behavior seems like the primary data source.
i need to know who downvoted me so i can ban them
Vote counts *are* visible by default for like 90% of Lemmy. Only a few instances hide them (or disable voting entirely). ๐คจ
Reworded. I'm sorry, I'm dumb.
Because they see it as voting. Voting is anonymous IRL, they want it to be online, too. Even though what people are generally voting for online is whether or not they think the poster is an asshole. ๐คท๐ปโโ๏ธ
But also, afaik, it *is* visible, if you're an instance admin. Thought about making my own instance just to see who the 1 dude that downvotes everything I post (sometimes milliseconds after posting) is and see why they're so butthurt.
It leads to low quality communities banning people who downvote their posts, artificially inflating their engagement metrics
It'd probably lead to lots of small drama and every disagreement getting to a personal level. It's speculation at this point. I also think a decent chunk of people here aren't able to behave nicely. I'm not sure if we should grant them additional capabilities.
But it's not like voting here on Lemmy were the pinnacle of technical advances... It's an echo chamber for popular opinions and common and often uninspiring interests. I think we could change how it works, as it's not super great in the first place.
Agreed. What's your pet solution?
Uh, it'd need to be either a complicated algorithm. I mean I'm often not interested in meme pictures and political news. I'd like the one niche hobby electronics project to float to the top for me. And they're just not so popular. So I don't see how voting would work for me in the first place. The other thing that works very well is having separate communities for topics. I can just subscribe to the electronics, disregard the world politics. I think that already helps me half the way. Also multireddits(?) or seperate feeds help. And I don't really have a good solution for the rest of it, yet. For the comments, i really don't know. Lots of good answers here don't even have any votes cast on them.
Well you didn't ask but I'll tell my solution anyway! *No downvote button.* That's it! In my experience downvoting is almost always about opinion and almost never about the quality of the comment. It's toxic. It's the equivalent of shouting "Shut up!" and so obviously discourages more sensitive contributors from expressing themselves. It's even technically a form of censorship because it makes the comment less visible. It's useless and pernicious and I don't get why we need it. End of rant.
I agree with you about meme pictures. Personally I'd love a setting to block all images completely.
Fair enough. There is one big upside with downvotes... And that is people can just click downvote and be done with it and move on with their day. I think that avoids some unhealthy conversations. And people really like to engage when they disagree. And it's far easier to disagree with someone than to write a nuanced and positive comment. I think a simple downvote allows people to just vent instead of spamming, for some mild cases.
Other than that I also don't see a good point in downvoting. Sometimes it helps with spam, slop, misinformation and just stupid stuff. But we already have a "report" button for that. And I frequently get singular random downvotes on my comments. And that's just annoying. I think regarding the voting mechanics, we'd be perfectly fine without downvotes.
I'd heard this argument before but you must put it better because I now understand it. An off-ramp for sterile conflict, basically. Yep that's fair and I never even thought of it.
Still, fact remains that I personally have never (literally never) downvoted a comment. Which inevitably makes the downvotes I receive feel even more unjust. Can't win!
Slashdot's system was a good compromise: no upvoting or downvoting, just labels like "insightful", "informative", "funny", (uh) "troll" etc. At least that forces people to be honest about what they're really trying to say.
Hmmh, there are some ideas out there. Maybe we'd be better off with these more nuanced slashdot labels, or emoji reactions. I mean they're not quite the same thing, but we have these emoji reactions on Github where you can give like 6 specific ones like thumbsup/down, a rocket, eyes ... And I think some of the Fediverse microblogging platforms have them. It's a step in that direction. The common argument against them is, we can't calculate a ranking with nuanced choices and it becomes unclear how to sort the posts.
And i still use some platforms entirely without voting. Like more old-school internet forums. I think they're fine and fun to use. Sometimes they offer the ability to give stars or medals for outstanding comments. But other than that voting is pretty much absent. I think it immediately makes them loose the social media vibes. But it often changes the atmosphere for the better. But it's probably really the result of several factors.
I don't know how to tie this up. Seems we agree, the current mechanics of Lemmy isn't the pinnacle of evolution. Maybe one day someone implements a better concept. It might take some effort to make fundamental changes, since this is baked into the underlying Fediverse. But there's lots of room for improvement left, in my opinion ๐
(And it'd probably help lots of users if the ranking and sorting wasn't just a blunt popularity contest.)
To be clear - are you asking about a breakdown of who voted which way or just a per comment/post total (i.e.
+6)*Sigh*
I'm going to have to repost aren't i?
This seems like a you thing. I mean, with no big algorithmic promotion engine and no immediate reward for upvotes I just don't see the point either way.There's like a dozen of us around here and no prize for being popular. Who gives a crap? It's a little button thingy that helps you feel like you did a thing to the thing wihtout having to write a post and clutteirng the feed. It does its job.
This may be overthinking things a bit butโฆ
I mod a desert of a sub for my alma mater, and Iโm pretty sure the same person downvotes everything I post there. No comments, just a single downvote. As a mod I would love to be able to confirm my suspicions, but as a user, I like my votes to be anonymous.
As a middle ground, perhaps the software itself could auto-mod a bit. If a single user only ever downvotes content from a community, and crosses a certain threshold, they might be soft-banned for some number of days with a note in the mod log to the effect of โnegative contribution.โ After some amount of time, the ban is automatically lifted. If a community mod notices that the same user keeps getting soft-banned every 30-something days (the soft-ban limit plus some amount of time for it to kick back in), they can decide if they want to ban the user.
If communities were standing alone, that idea would work. But communities are hosted and shared on an instance. I find it questionable in that context; it's a slippery slope.
Should an instance's users be able to vote on every community they see in their local feed, or should only community members be able to? Instance admins may decide a community does not violates instance rules, while users may feel like it does not fit the spirit or goals or mentality of an instance.
It could work if only community members can vote in their communities. Then you could make community-specific decisions and consequences, and the border of instance and community would be separated by definition.
There's certain content that will always get downvoted.
Who says I am?
Votes don't matter. They are the hide button of Lemmy.
As an instance admin, you can see who voted what. Moderators are also able to view votes in their community. See discussion regarding vote privacy here: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/4967
You know what I'm really against? People asking leading questions in asklemmy.
If you want to read up on people's objections, there's load of comments at https://lemmy.world/post/18805474 and the GitHub Issue it links to at https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/4967
I'm not personally in favour of ideas about voting privacy (I think it's a bit anti-Fediverse and hampers backfilling), but those who disagree tend to feel more strongly about it than I do, so I try to avoid arguments about it.
I'd like to just see the name of the moderator that is banning me from 50 different communities they have the free time to moderate even if I've never posted in them because they disagreed with my opinion in one of them. I like to know who has skin thinner than the rice paper around a Botan candy.
If you view the modlog from an mbin instance it shows which mod took the action. The mbin modlogs aren't very good for searching through, but a recent action should be easy enough to see
You shouldn't read too much into being banned from 50 communities - it's just a fudgy workaround for being banned from the instance.
it was davel and it was for being a liberal
Yeah I figured that was the reason.
Out, loud, and proud
homosexualliberal (actually I am also homosexual)! Fuck tankies!The modlog is public on lemmy
It doesn't show you who is doing the modding though as far as I've seen. I've had some anonymous .ml mods remove some of my comments while citing rules that don't exist.
'Xenophobia' in this context means arguing with a Hexbear troll spreading disinformation and having one of his buddies ban me, but regardless, these aren't what I was referring to.
You skipped over the ones I was referring to here:
This is all I see on my end.
oh my bad
Upvotes are public if you use mbin, not sure why downvotes are hidden
Sure dude, I bet that's the only reason.
Imagine raging against the dude who downvoted you. That reasoning sounds more believable than "transparency". It was "that much" you had to ask a way to know WHO is downvoting you.
Imagine caring for who downvotes. How dare they.
How does any of that apply to Lemmy? There's no commercial interests represented here. I'm not following anyone on Lemmy because of their amount of upvotes. I'll occasionally look at the heavily downvoted to see if its a opposing view I should consider, but mostly I see those are just trolling/racism/misogyny.
I like the different here over reddit for Karma. There's no "score" and therefor no incentive for farming Karma and all the negatives that creates. We're all equal here.
edit: to my downvoter. Thank you for perfectly proving my point. The whole thread is actually asking for opinions on why each of us holds a position on upvote/downvote transparency, and you downvote my valid opinion. I don't need the vote transparency to tell me who you are, your downvote on this tells me everything I need to know about you and how to value your opinion.
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Oh? The answer requested by the OP is *purely subjective*. There *is no right answer*. Each of our answers is right *for us*, which is why the OP asked "Why are you *personally*...".
There is no objectively right answer here, therefore all personal opinions are valid.
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Wait, are you agreeing with me that commercial interested doesn't exist *yet*? I'm making no claims about the future of it.
You're framing what occurred incorrectly. The OP is calling for vote *transparency*, as in ownership of the upvote or downvote to the person casting it. I'm saying that the ownership of the upvote or downvote is irrelevant. I'm proving my point because I don't care who cast the downvote on my post.
It would be hypocrisy if I was claiming that knowing the ownership of the upvote/downvote doesn't matter, and if I then demanded to *know* who downvoted me. I'm doing not such thing. I celebrate the anonymity of the downvoter. I just don't put any stock in their downvote, which is my entire point that upvote/downvote ownership knowledge isn't required or desired by me. Even if you disagree with my opinion, which you're welcome to, its consistent and without hypocrisy .
I'm a rando on the internet to you. I am very glad you don't put enough stock in anything anyone says on a random message board that would cause you any strong feelings positive or negative.
In 2025, I think it's overly simplistic to think of what people say strictly in terms of "like" and "dislike", as opposed to different moods. It does make for a good polling system though.
I'd like to see named upvotes (if that's already a thing, sorry I'm just a casual lurker couldn't be bothered to find out)
Would be cool to have this feature. More transparency=better.