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Lemmy votes ARE public, should they be anonymous?
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this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2024
693 points (97.5% liked)
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On Kbin the votes are 100% public for anyone. I've migrated to Lemmy after the frequent server issues with Kbin and I miss that part dearly. It was very easy to gauge whether someone was engaging in a good or bad faith discussion by checking the votes within a discussion. That being said, personally I'm very light on my downvotes, and I can see how someone more trigger-happy would see it as worrying. Personally I see the vote transparency as healthy though.
To be fair, there's a point to be made that someone who's overly trigger-happy on dislike should be shamed for it. Just like you would be if you kept being snide to everyone in real life.
I agree that transparency would do much more good than harm, plus compared to the info that people already put in their profiles/comments, it's not likely to make them anymore identifiable.
I'd even argue public votes can deescalate some situations, for example where both sides of a relatively heated discussion can see they vote each other up. They don't necessarily agree but they appreciate the other side's points.
As for the transparency, it's not possible to list all the votes of a user, one rather needs to list votes on a given post. To profile a given user the attacker would need to cross-reference the data from all posts and comments which is computationally infeasible, both client-side and server-side.