Currently, almost anyone in the Fediverse can see Lemmys votes. Lemmy admins can see votes, as well as mods. Only regular Lemmy users can’t. Should the Lemmy devs create a way to make the votes anonymous?
There is a discussion going on right now considering “making the Lemmy votes public” but I think that premisse is just wrong. The votes are public already, they’re just hidden from Lemmy users. Anyone from a kbin/mbin/fedia instance can check out the votes if they are so inclined.
The users right now may fall into a false sense of privacy when voting because the votes are hidden from Lemmy users. If you want to vote something and not show up on the vote list, please create another account to support that type of content and don’t tell anyone.
I always thought anonymous voting was preferable, or at least non-public. I don’t want “why did you downvote me bro!?”-arguments to occur, and I don’t want to know who approves of my comments or not. I think thinking of votes as an amorphous blob representing general public opinion on Lemmy is preferable to getting into the weeds of who exactly likes your posts and comments.
We could also have “karma” on Lemmy, but while technically tracked the environment is better off without it being public in my opinion. I view voting records similarly.
If botting becomes enough of an issue that regular users need to report vote manipulation bots I’ll be fine with conceding my stance.
As a comment on the other discussion says, there’s a reason ballots are secret.
In reality you should be able to get an anonymized reference number to show your vote was tabulated correctly though.
Right now it comes down to an actual official finding your paper ballot with hand marked tracking and presuming the computer read it correctly on an overall vote total.
Being able to do this anonymously and securely is where the problems lie. Which is also why digital only voting still isn’t a thing anywhere.
There’s also a reason why votes in parliaments aren’t secret.
Because they’re supposed to be responsible to and represent the people who voted for them. Irrelevant to this situation.
I agree. As long as anonymous voting doesn’t cause obvious trolling/spam issues, it should be preferred.
One of the reasons I’ve always found Facebook off-putting and never used it (even before learning about the shady practices) are the very visible votes. I tend to overanalyse any reaction and would judge people based on their votes on my posts, even if I consciously tried to avoid it. Similarly, I imagine some other people would do the same and I’d feel like I’m under surveillance.
It honestly just opens up a whole shitty can of worms. Are admins ready to weigh in every time someone fakes a vote history screenshot showing that so and so up voted a bomb threat before the post got removed?