Generally speaking, you shouldn’t do anything on the internet that you absolutely don’t want to become public. If you don’t want people to know your votes, don’t vote.

There’s an easy solution. Dump and create new accounts every week or month or whatever fits your needs. Backup and move your data if you want (lemmy’s data import doesn’t work well with big data though).

Just like changing your password routinely increases your security, new online identity gives you privacy.

So the annoying neckbeard i downvoted for being an annoying neckbeard is gonna DM me?

If a website could be sure none of their users are malicious/bots and all of the users are perfectly rational and virtuous then public or private voting wouldn’t matter either way. That being nearly impossible, why not a reputation based system like Stack Exchange? Only when an account meets certain requirements they can vote.

To boot, on the website tweakers.net one can actually vote -1, …, +3.

• +3: “Spotlight comments are of such high quality and substantive value that they clearly stand out above the rest”
• +2: “Informative and interesting comments that are a useful addition to the discussion in an on-topic thread or the information in the article”
• +1: “Nice on-topic responses with knowledge that is common knowledge”
• +0: “Comments that do not contain a relevant contribution, but are posted with good intentions”
• -1: “Flamebaits, trolls, misplaced jokes, unnecessarily hurtful comments and other comments that violate our terms and conditions or house rules”

[Posted this comment on GitHub.]

The fact that the devs even considered this is a bad sign, IMO. How out of touch does one have to be to think this is a good thing in any capacity?

I was of the assumption they were private. Please make them private then because I want no one looking at my votes

Yes make it public.

No real reason not to.

“That dude downvoted a cute cat pic, get 'im!”

I really don’t care about what any of you think, so go for it. Perhaps better discussion will come from it. And I’d like to block users with consistent negative behaviours.

My posts and comments are already exposed, so it seems like it would make sense to make votes public as well. I think it contributes to the general spirit of the platform.

This would probably escalate a lot of arguments that break out in comment sections.

Yes, and there’s no genuine argument otherwise.

If you want Lemmy to grow and not be completely overrun with bots posting propaganda and signal boosting extremism, showing votes is the only way forward. It’s the only mechanism by which independent parties can discover and expose things like “every post and comment by this account is upvoted by these 20 other accounts that have never posted and whose names follow the same formula”.

The privacy you’re mourning never existed in the first place and it can’t exist on any platform. For Lemmy, it’s required for federation. On sites like Reddit, you have privacy from other users, but not from the company or anyone they sell that data to.

Since true privacy isn’t an option, it would be far better to be open about that lack of privacy. This thread is already riddled with people who thought their votes were private, rather than just inconvient to look up. That’s far more dangerous and deceptive.

This needs to happen, regardless of the ill-informed tantrums it may cause. If you want to upvote pornography without it being used against you, create accounts that are strictly for pornography and properly compartmentalize your accounts.

You could make a client or browser add-on or something that just uses a separate account for all your voting.

likes and votes should be anonymous and user names should only be displayed for comments.

Based on the comment, it seems there’s more opposition toward visible downvote than upvote, so maybe dev should just make upvote visible and not downvote?

There’s more talk about how bad visible downvote is and no one seems to talk about the upvote lol.