I mod a few communities and I can now see who has upvoted or downvoted any comment or post in the community.
You’d think any mod would like that data being available to find any issue user. But I feel like invasive with this.
I know admins have long been able to see this data.
Also its not like its personally information, just your screen name associated with your own activity, as your posts and comments are. But the passive act of voting is now very public which is a bit icky to me.
How do you all feel about this?
I’m sorry I haven’t been super active on Lemmy and missed much of the conversation around this. I’ll go find any relevant discussions too.
You can read the github comments on this question
Long story short: The overwhelming consensus is that ppl prefer their votes to be private, but to avoid targeted vote manipulation (which is pretty common now unfortunately), votes in lemmy are semi-private: only visible to admins and mods, but not to the majority of users.
Yeah I mod like 10 communities and I feel wrong doing it. Dont think I’ll ever be checking that again.
Entirely up to you.
For larger communities, its a must, since people use no-content accounts or bot accounts to mass up or downvote content.
Would you say 3k subscribers and 1k monthly users is a big amount?
I genuinely dont know what to classify as big
On the face of things, being open about voting is good. Vote manipulation can be handled by the masses instead of some dystopian head admins.
On the other hand sensitive idiots use the voting data to ban others from communities. Reddit started a rumour that voting habits were being used to ban users off the site for their political views, but on Lemmy it’s more obvious. Bans for “vote manipulation” for down voting a single post in a community have been reported multiple times on YePowerTrippinBastards.
It’s a double edged sword.
My understanding is that all of this vote data is already exchanged on the public Internet, and that it has to be this way for federation to work. It’s a client and interface design feature to show the data or not to show the data. So you should probably assume that icky people on the Internet are already looking at it.
Yeah that’s fair enough. Better everyone sees it than just a few ig?
There are a shit ton of serial downvoters, and as a mod, this helps you find them. Not as much on the larger instances, but the small ones. If you just post something and there are 30 users, and there are 8 downvotes, it’s pretty obvious what they’re doing.
I know, was a big thing on lemmy.dbzer0.com but. I’d rather get rid of downvotes than have them be so public
I personally prefer them. They’re not perfect, but it’s better than having a facebook kind of experience.
Understandable
I don’t personally understand the purpose of downvotes. They seem to mostly gather on posts that should be removed by a moderator or on jokes that were misunderstood. Seems pointless.
Ive actually anyways liked the idea of having net votes
I think it’s kinda good, we just need to get used to it. I mean lots of platforms have public votes/reactions, even Facebook shows who liked/reacted on posts.
