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.
this post was submitted on 08 Feb 2025
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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. Doesn’t 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 have so little going on in their lives that they thought 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.
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.
Oh, neat!
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.
people can just click downvote and be done with it and move on with their day. I think that avoids some unhealthy conversations.
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 😉
(And it'd probably help lots of users if the ranking and sorting wasn't just a blunt popularity contest.)
They're usual for non-participants, IMO. When you're a passive consumer looking for actual information or insight, the sortable comment score is what makes all the difference.
emoji reactions on Github where you can give like 6 specific ones
Forgot about that. Yes exactly, would definitely be progress.
I don’t know how to tie this up
Upvote and move on. :) But still, emojis would be better.
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
I don't have a strong opiniion on the matter, but it really seems like it would encourage stalking and revenge-downvotes.
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I'm not sure what you're referring to here.
If you mean like to see who upvoted and who downvoted you, you can actually see that on Mbin. It's a Lemmy fork that allows you to see exactly who upvoted and downvoted your comments or posts. Lemmy just didn't add that function itself.
If you mean a Karma total, because it just harbors a competition. If people are posting just to get their number higher then they don't care about the community or engagement. They just want a bigger number on their account. I don't post a fuckload because I want Karma, I post a fuckload because I like lemmy and wanna give it some content because I have saved content.
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 didn’t really use it.
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This may be overthinking things a bit but…
I mod a desert of a sub for my alma mater, and I’m 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 “negative contribution.” 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.
Upvotes are public if you use mbin, not sure why downvotes are hidden
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.
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.
Im not but actually I really wish the stuff done with trust cafe was integrated into the fediverse. Up votes and down votes are fine for general recomendations but me being able to rank users is pretty huge.
To be clear - are you asking about a breakdown of who voted which way or just a per comment/post total (i.e. +6)
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Who says I am?
Votes don't matter. They are the hide button of Lemmy.
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