[Discussion] Should votes be displayed publicly? · Issue #4967 · LemmyNet/lemmy
github.com
Question I'd like to hear everyone's thoughts on possibly making votes public. This has been discussed in a lot of other issues, but here's a dedicated one for discussion. Positives Could help figh...

I really wanted to post this on !traaaaaaannnnnnnnnns@hexbear.net but I'm not trans myself and I didn't want to take up their space.

Basically, the devs of Lemmy are looking to make upvotes public to everyone. Right now, I believe voter identities are known to server admins and mods.

I don't have a strong opinion on this myself, either for or against, as I write this comment, but I'm wondering if there's something I'm missing, frankly as a cishet dude.

But also... I've kinda lost trust in Nutomic making decisions about the software that won't make things worse for trans people since his comments on the Olympics were made public. Dessalines has (so far) at least tolerated Nutomic's transphobia despite whatever prior rhetoric. Frankly, I am suspicious that trans people don't matter to the Lemmy dev team...to be charitable...so I'd really like to hear your thoughts.

  • RedWizard [he/him, comrade/them]
    ·
    3 months ago

    So I guess removing public likes and retweets on Twitter was a good move and not in service of protecting users from exposing themselfs as Nazis then.

    Digg is almost what, 20+ years old? That's almost three generations of platforms ago, we exist in a federated environment where each instance has it's own ecosystem and can selectively block entire swaths of the platform on ideological grounds or for petty reasons. Hell, users can block whole instances now. Were well beyond tit for tat spit spats over vote history at this point.

    Electoral votes are private in essentially all elections.

    Yes.

    The existence of an exception doesn't change the fact that most people have an expectation of privacy while voting.

    Yes.

    This clearly extends to internet forums or else we wouldn't be having this conversation.

    These are not even in the same universe. The only reason people expect that they are private is because they're private on reddit. They're private on reddit because reddit needs too be able to juice or squash front page content using their fuzzy vote counters.

    Reddit having public updogs would have given the whole game away. I remember when reddit didn't have a fuzzy vote counter and they quietly rolled it out. People we're not happy about it because it meant more opacity on the platform. It made it harder to know if people we're breggading posts and subs. People questioned the votes constantly.