Just wish there were more transparency around counts and content engagement.
I firmly believe most influencer these day were propped up with payed views and botted engagement. Not that lemmy is the same but it all feels so dirty.
Upvotes are public if you use mbin, not sure why downvotes are hidden
You know what I’m really against? People asking leading questions in asklemmy.
To be clear - are you asking about a breakdown of who voted which way or just a per comment/post total (i.e.
+6)Sigh
I’m going to have to repost aren’t i?
This seems like a you thing. I mean, with no big algorithmic promotion engine and no immediate reward for upvotes I just don’t see the point either way.There’s like a dozen of us around here and no prize for being popular. Who gives a crap? It’s a little button thingy that helps you feel like you did a thing to the thing wihtout having to write a post and clutteirng the feed. It does its job.
I don’t love the idea that Nazis can lookup that I voted against their propaganda when it appears here.
Piefed has supposedly implemented a workaround to allow for private voting.
Oh, neat!
It leads to low quality communities banning people who downvote their posts, artificially inflating their engagement metrics
I prefer votes being semi-anonymous. The vote counts are technically public, you just have to use software that displays them, but that added barrier is enough for most people to never check and that is how I prefer it. I feel like seeing voter names just encourages getting into pissing contests about “why did you downvote me” which I don’t want to happen because: A, votes don’t matter and B, if someone downvoted without commenting they probably don’t want to spend half an hour arguing in comments.
if someone downvoted without commenting they probably don’t want to spend half an hour arguing in comments.
Bingo.
This is precisely my reason for why they should be public.
In my view downvotes should be used sparingly, only to suppress spam and trolling comments that don’t add to the conversation.
By keeping votes private people just downvote anything they disagree with
Wouldn’t that give trolls a juicy target to harass, thus leading into people not bothering to downvote to avoid the harassment?
That’s what the report and block tools are for.
If it occurs harassment is an issue for moderators and admins to deal with.
So what are you going to do with the knowledge that I downvoted your comment?
You have no reason to so I presume you haven’t.
If we were actually in a discussion and you started downvoting all my comments I’d see it as a sign of pettiness and disengage.
I’d probably also tag you as a reminder to myself not to engage with you again.
You have no reason to so I presume you haven’t.
I’m telling you I downvoted your comment.
You got your answer, I guess.
I guess. I don’t get it. If I refused to talk to anyone if they ever downvoted me, I would run out of people to talk pretty quickly.
Back when I first started using Reddit well over a decade ago, voting was explained as “upvote things you want to see more of and downvote the things you want to see less of”. That’s how I still treat it for the most part. I downvote loads of things not because they’re inherently bad or I disagree with the content but purely because it’s not what I want to see.
It’s fake internet points, the amount you have doesn’t matter in the slightest. There’s no reason not to downvote what you disagree with.
I think the idea is that what we want to see more of is genuine discussions in good faith using sound arguments, even if we don’t personally agree with the viewpoint.
If I’m just tired of seeing certain types of posts I can block them without downvoting their posts.This is how you end up with echo chambers.
It’s fake internet points, the amount you have doesn’t matter in the slightest. There’s no reason not to downvote what you disagree with.
The amount on each individual comment does matter, as it affects how the algorithms order comments when showing them to other people.
Would be cool to have this feature. More transparency=better.
Im not but actually I really wish the stuff done with trust cafe was integrated into the fediverse. Up votes and down votes are fine for general recomendations but me being able to rank users is pretty huge.
This may be overthinking things a bit but…
I mod a desert of a sub for my alma mater, and I’m pretty sure the same person downvotes everything I post there. No comments, just a single downvote. As a mod I would love to be able to confirm my suspicions, but as a user, I like my votes to be anonymous.
As a middle ground, perhaps the software itself could auto-mod a bit. If a single user only ever downvotes content from a community, and crosses a certain threshold, they might be soft-banned for some number of days with a note in the mod log to the effect of “negative contribution.” After some amount of time, the ban is automatically lifted. If a community mod notices that the same user keeps getting soft-banned every 30-something days (the soft-ban limit plus some amount of time for it to kick back in), they can decide if they want to ban the user.
Because the reason for a vote is personal and different to everyone.
If I see a post with a title containing 20 emojis, I downvote it. Doesn’t matter the content of the post.
Now, assume that post was about fighting for lgbt rights or fighting against anti-abortion legislation. Some moral crusader sees my downvote and immediately calls me a bigot. When, from my perspective, all I did was downvote a bunch of emojis.
Take that idea and expand it.
This. One thing I couldn’t stand about Reddit was seeing people who have so little going on in their lives that they thought it worthwhile to “background check” other posters.
This was a big thing with Twitter too. “Oh, they follow such-and-such in their list of 10,000 follows, who turned out to be bad in recent news, so this person’s views are worthless and they must also be bad!”
Like, being able to have a quick glance and be like "Ah this is clearly a bot / hate-troll / what-haves, can be handy for some sense of accountability, but purity-testing and association-mobs are the stuff of cautionary science fiction, and should be avoided.
I’ve seen it too often on Lemmy too.
Most are of what you describe, but not all of them. I have seen valuable background checks before (back on Reddit). I specifically remember an elaborate post about bots/botnet.
I don’t like your dismissive qualification of “have so little going on in their lives”. Some background checks are good and important. Dismissing people who are willing to invest into that in general, but also dismissing people who “have nothing better to do” for their situation, feels like an awful, uncalled-for, inappropriate insult.
/edit: Rewording to better get my point across.
100% agreed.
I wish people would respond to the comment, not the commenter.
In 2025, I think it’s overly simplistic to think of what people say strictly in terms of “like” and “dislike”, as opposed to different moods. It does make for a good polling system though.
As an instance admin, you can see who voted what. Moderators are also able to view votes in their community. See discussion regarding vote privacy here: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/4967
I firmly believe most influencer these day were propped up with payed views and botted engagement.
How does any of that apply to Lemmy? There’s no commercial interests represented here. I’m not following anyone on Lemmy because of their amount of upvotes. I’ll occasionally look at the heavily downvoted to see if its a opposing view I should consider, but mostly I see those are just trolling/racism/misogyny.
I like the different here over reddit for Karma. There’s no “score” and therefor no incentive for farming Karma and all the negatives that creates. We’re all equal here.
just because you hold an opinion doesn’t make it valid.
Oh? The answer requested by the OP is purely subjective. There is no right answer. Each of our answers is right for us, which is why the OP asked “Why are you personally…”.
There is no objectively right answer here, therefore all personal opinions are valid.
your supposition that there’s no commercial interests here is incorrect. just because it hasn’t manifested yet doesn’t mean it isn’t lurking beneath the surface.
I think the most recent “polish canadian girl” campaign was quite effective and displayed exactly what it was supposed to do.
the NSFW lemmy instance is growing in numbers most recently due to the purge happening at Reddit. those posts are very much economic in nature.
also, there’s strong corporatist agendas on lemmy. sure, there is plenty of political theater and grandstanding made by bots and fools alike but in reality…those can easily sway a nation.
so yes, I’ll admit that your opinion is “valid”, but it’s also unwarranted, baseless, and circumstantial based entirely upon your own limited point of view. that’s not your fault though, it’s your opinion.
it’s funny, opinions, everyone has one about something or someone. but really, we never stop to think, “Does anybody really care about this?”
I sure don’t, I just wanted to extended a bit of “friendly” courtesy to point out the hypocrisy in your own words. In one breath you celebrate the freedom that comes from being unrestrained by vote count–and in the other your unabashedly chastise someone for daring to downvote your opinion and in turn sharing their opinion of your opinion.
Don’t worry, I swear I won’t form a complex opinion of you that’s too harsh. you certainly haven’t said anything that would warrant a strong opinion anyway.
your supposition that there’s no commercial interests here is incorrect. just because it hasn’t manifested yet doesn’t mean it isn’t lurking beneath the surface
Wait, are you agreeing with me that commercial interested doesn’t exist yet? I’m making no claims about the future of it.
I sure don’t, I just wanted to extended a bit of “friendly” courtesy to point out the hypocrisy in your own words. In one breath you celebrate the freedom that comes from being unrestrained by vote count–and in the other your unabashedly chastise someone for daring to downvote your opinion and in turn sharing their opinion of your opinion.
You’re framing what occurred incorrectly. The OP is calling for vote transparency, as in ownership of the upvote or downvote to the person casting it. I’m saying that the ownership of the upvote or downvote is irrelevant. I’m proving my point because I don’t care who cast the downvote on my post.
It would be hypocrisy if I was claiming that knowing the ownership of the upvote/downvote doesn’t matter, and if I then demanded to know who downvoted me. I’m doing not such thing. I celebrate the anonymity of the downvoter. I just don’t put any stock in their downvote, which is my entire point that upvote/downvote ownership knowledge isn’t required or desired by me. Even if you disagree with my opinion, which you’re welcome to, its consistent and without hypocrisy .
Don’t worry, I swear I won’t form a complex opinion of you that’s too harsh. you certainly haven’t said anything that would warrant a strong opinion anyway.
I’m a rando on the internet to you. I am very glad you don’t put enough stock in anything anyone says on a random message board that would cause you any strong feelings positive or negative.
I’m not sure what you’re referring to here.
If you mean like to see who upvoted and who downvoted you, you can actually see that on Mbin. It’s a Lemmy fork that allows you to see exactly who upvoted and downvoted your comments or posts. Lemmy just didn’t add that function itself.
If you mean a Karma total, because it just harbors a competition. If people are posting just to get their number higher then they don’t care about the community or engagement. They just want a bigger number on their account. I don’t post a fuckload because I want Karma, I post a fuckload because I like lemmy and wanna give it some content because I have saved content.
Mbin shows who upvoted, but it does not show who downvoted. Kbin used to show both, but there are no active Kbin servers anymore.
I was just thinking about kbin. It died? I signed up long ago but didn’t really use it.
First, I wasn’t talking karma count, I think that is toxic.
To answer the rest, I guess I would like to have the option of seeing who voted native to the main site.
I don’t like downloading apps or installing plugins.
Vote counts are visible by default for like 90% of Lemmy. Only a few instances hide them (or disable voting entirely). 🤨
Reworded. I’m sorry, I’m dumb.
Because they see it as voting. Voting is anonymous IRL, they want it to be online, too. Even though what people are generally voting for online is whether or not they think the poster is an asshole. 🤷🏻♂️
Mbin is not an app or a plugin. It is a fork which means that it took the basecode of Lemmy and repurposed it into something else. Some instances have then used Mbin, like fedia.io. It just happens to be that lemmy.world doesn’t include that function because it uses Lemmy as its base and not Mbin.
Mbin is able to completely interact with Lemmy, mind you, so it’s not seperate in anyway other than how it works.
So, you’re saying I have to change my instance? Which would be fine and I am already debating just that.
If you want to see who specifically upvoted or downvoted, then yes. If you want the general numbers you can stay here.
Personally I’ve never understood the obsession with seeing who votes for you. I post constantly and have people who follow me about downvoting me everywhere. If I was checking who was downvoting me all the time, I’d never get shit done.
i need to know who downvoted me so i can ban them
Mbin is a fork of Kbin, a different independent project, not Lemmy.
My mistake, you’re right.
