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.
this post was submitted on 08 Feb 2025
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It leads to low quality communities banning people who downvote their posts, artificially inflating their engagement metrics
You know what I'm really against? People asking leading questions in asklemmy.
Just wish there were more transparency around counts and content engagement.
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.
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)
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.
if someone downvoted without commenting they probably don’t want to spend half an hour arguing in comments.
Bingo.
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(16 replies)
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 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.
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.
100% agreed.
I wish people would respond to the comment, not the commenter.
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.
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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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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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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
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.
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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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.
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