Lemmy devs are looking to make votes public. Thoughts?

The potential for drama is

Now when people get into a spat they will be able to compile a list of everyone who sides with their enemy or agrees with them

Personally, admin can already see votes if we need to purge reactionaries which is plenty of transparency as far as I'm concerned. Although imagining a big struggle session on here with public upvotes is very funny, I'll admit

Personally? I don't want it unless I can toggle a setting that makes my likes private. I don't want to wake up to 50 messages because I liked something that I wasn't supposed to because I was half asleep and didn't know the entire post history of a user.

Yeah, we used this to check for people mass down voting trans users and then banned them(then down votes was removed)

I'm going to get roasted for forgetting to upbear the threads i post in

This is definitely going to add to the mental health problems of the type of people who obsess about this shit.

I’d like mods to be able to see it. If I imagine an interaction with a random user commenting on my upvotes, I can’t help but imagine this being the most tiring person in the world.

My position on removing our dislikes here on Hexbear was because of research papers showing it objectively caused negative outcomes.

I can't find the paper for this but I am 100% certain that this topic has been researched and that I recall public "likes" were healthier for user behaviour while public dislikes caused major problems.

I would be for public upvotes, I would recommend removing downvotes entirely as per the research, but in lieu of that and because Lemmy's mission is generally to be a reddit-clone I'd say keep the dislikes secret. Their existence is a negative to begin with, making them public is only going to spawn a huge number of confrontations as people confront the first person that downvoted them and demand a reason. It'll be a mess.

My position remains with the research on these topics, the research is good, a huge number of people here poo-poo'd the idea of removing downvotes but came around, trust the research.

Pinging this thread @dessalines@lemmy.ml way as you couldn't pay me to make a github account just to say this.

Yes absolutely this needs to happen. This will be hugely helpful for establishing accountability for people who upvote awful posts.

Sounds like a big potential for harassment. The drama sounds fun, and so do the bits, but we already know that marginalized groups struggle with harassment on lemmy. I'd want to hear from people who are more knowledgable of how harassment works on lemmy or have experienced it to learn what their concerns are.

As well as being poor for opsec, without a very clear use case, I think this would just create more anxiety in people. I don't see it making for a happier nicer community.

Broke: Making upvotes public so people are held accountable over what they upvote.

Woke: Taking away upvotes so people have to comment if they agree with a post.

People have to like my posts enough to want to stamp their names publically by voting them? Gonna find out who's brave enough to be seen upbearing autistic nerd shit.

This really should be the norm. If you look at old phpbb sites and the like generally when you “like” or “find a post helpful” or whatever they call it they will list the users who have liked a post.

This whole anonymous voting thing is again a redditism that lemmy devs need to break free from.

If you want to publicly support a statement, that's what comments are for. Upvotes are for privately agreeing with statements or marking them as read.

Remove upbears along with downbears. Return to forum posting.

I say Do it, when the admins here did it to ban all the transphobes a year ago it made the site way better, plus i dont think it will reduce votes.

since his comments on the Olympics were made public

No. Please don't. I don't want that info and I don't want to participate in a site where everyone else is looking at that info. I don't care that it's already technically available, it shouldn't be default

IDK basically our votes were nonconsensually used to police behavior by mods back in the @TransComrade69@hexbear.net days and it made me feel real prickly even though I didn't really have anything to fear. I've basically assumed my votes were as good as public this whole time with the assumption mods could on-a-dime choose them to be.

I think HB has an echo chamber problem and I don't think this kind of policy helps that at all.

This absolutely should happen. Make people accountable without the need for moderation action.

I'm going to be real with you. I've been able to see all votes on lemmy publicly for years. You should just make them public, because I've been scraping you and collecting statistics on how much you use bots.

Just make them public or I'm the only one who can do this. Your choice. Being helpful for fun here.

Oh this is gonna be really funny if it happens

Stoked to open up all new ways to dunk on people

I think it's a bad idea but I don't have the energy to argue.

I've upvoted every single bad post on this site and I fear being hunted Wild Wild West style via saw blades magnetically called to my location, so I have mixed opinion on this.

An average user absolutely benefits from being able to see who voted on a post or comment and what their vote was. A person noticing that someone is actively down voting their content in a deliberate way empowers the user to have it dealt with. Mods might not queue into that kind of targeted harassment.

All these comments comparing a vote on Lemmy to a vote within a democratic election are incredibly juvenile frankly. Its reductionist when saying Electoralism is equivalent to a Lemmy Vote and egotistical when saying a Lemmy Vote is equivalent to a ballot cast in a democratic election.

Your vote isn't private in either case regardless. At most you need to know someone's birthday, first name, and last name to find someone's voting record in America (might depend state by state). Someone willing to set up a Lemmy instance to see your votes is also capable of then setting up bots to specifically target you with down votes, which is the more egregious of the two actions.

Given the ease in which someone could create a bot network for the purpose of targeting someone or a group of people with a downvote campaign, I think it's only just to allow regular users the power to see votes and act on that information. Why should this information be gate kept to only the technically capable?

Keeping votes "hidden" maintains a kind of voyeuristic experience for those with the power or technical knowledge and resources while maintaining this illusion of privacy for the masses.

Make them visible to all.

No way. The admins can see them already.

You should not be afraid of the opinions of the people. You should seek to understand and possibly change it if necessary. It is a far better meter stick of how people really think if it's anonymous, and it also stops users being hounded.

Also why is this discussion being had on github and not lemmy? The pros and cons is more of a community concern than a programmatic one.

Doesn't matter on Hexbear since I upvote randomly.

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I’m in favor of information symmetry between admins and users. That data is in the database and we’re trying to foster a pro-social environment, so being able to see who’s voting on what might help that along. Just please don’t start sending notifications for likes like Facebook and TikTok do

I'm going to make a bad-take-liker alt specifically for lurking so that people know to feel a deep sense of shame when they see that I have liked their post.

edit: alt account #2 will like at most one other user's comment every day, you will have to find them all in chronological order to read my manifesto. Skipped days are paragraph breaks.

sounds cool

Idk why bother, either way it won't make lemmy less full of liberals who would use ul a genie wish to make NATO rule the world and think it's a "promoting freedom" or something rather than U.S. imperial ambitions

It'd make it much easier to weed out transphobes and misogynists, the latter which this site has had a historical issue with.

BASED BASED BASED

@marcie@lemmy.ml you asked for this!

Nah. If mods can already see this, I’m fine leaving it as is if massive nerds can already see it, might as well make it public

Please don't. I've been "investigated" (harassed) off other sites that had this.

I have zero skin in the game, so from a personal perspective I don't care either way. Everybody is going to find out that I upvote shitposts and people who respond to me—that's going to be the extent of my consequences if votes go public.

Philosophically I think transparency is better than obfuscation. Especially since a dedicated user can figure the info out right now, anyway.

Are the admins/mods willing to be extra trigger happy with bans if/when this is used to harass people?

Or will this just chase lots more users to hexbear?

Votes should be public. If you don't like it, don't upvote racist shit.

The ideological flip-flop on this from some people is very funny to me, and I'm sure they know who they are. Some of yall are cowards.

no more half measures walter

Looks like the response is split between "no" and "why aren't votes anonymous to begin with"

My thoughts? My opinion don’t matter for shit but frankly idgaf either way. I dont care who sees what.

The cognitive dissonance between the responses to this recommendation and the same people lambasting Twitter for removing this is wild

Voting is bad. One thing we should #take from stormfront is old Reddit just got this feature recently where when you scroll past a post it turns down the opacity a bit. Really helps to see what you've read and what is new

I'd like it to be an opt-in thing so my crushes don't notice me upbearing all their posts

Guys if you want them to add public votes please make a GitHub account (I know I know) and give a thumbs up on the issue or a comment.

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make votes only visible on your own comments. I might elaborate further but likely wont.