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The potential for drama is 
Now when people get into a spat they will be able to compile a list of everyone who sides with their enemy or agrees with them 
Personally, admin can already see votes if we need to purge reactionaries which is plenty of transparency as far as I'm concerned. Although imagining a big struggle session on here with public upvotes is very funny, I'll admit
Me destroying someone's tl;dr novela of a post with "[bad take] upvoter."
Now when people get into a spat they will be able to compile a list of everyone who sides with their enemy or agrees with them
Awesome, dude. That sounds like totally normal and non-toxic behaviour. Terminally online people looking for new ways to be terminally online.
Yeah, we used this to check for people mass down voting trans users and then banned them(then down votes was removed)
Personally? I don't want it unless I can toggle a setting that makes my likes private. I don't want to wake up to 50 messages because I liked something that I wasn't supposed to because I was half asleep and didn't know the entire post history of a user.
I shared a meme one time by a guy I didnt realize had a roman bust as an avatar and a buncha people called me a fascist. The internet is unforgiving!
I'm going to get roasted for forgetting to upbear the threads i post in
I already feel guilty when I don't upbear someone I'm talking to and now I will feel even more pressure to do it to keep the tone friendly even if I don't like their points.
My position on removing our dislikes here on Hexbear was because of research papers showing it objectively caused negative outcomes.
I can't find the paper for this but I am 100% certain that this topic has been researched and that I recall public "likes" were healthier for user behaviour while public dislikes caused major problems.
I would be for public upvotes, I would recommend removing downvotes entirely as per the research, but in lieu of that and because Lemmy's mission is generally to be a reddit-clone I'd say keep the dislikes secret. Their existence is a negative to begin with, making them public is only going to spawn a huge number of confrontations as people confront the first person that downvoted them and demand a reason. It'll be a mess.
My position remains with the research on these topics, the research is good, a huge number of people here poo-poo'd the idea of removing downvotes but came around, trust the research.
Pinging this thread @dessalines@lemmy.ml way as you couldn't pay me to make a github account just to say this.
Found the paper! Don't fault you for not being able to find it, since the most obvious search keywords are generic and result in a bazillion unrelated studies--I just found it through your old comment:
How Community Feedback Shapes User Behavior (PDF link is in the right-hand menu)
Abstract:
Social media systems rely on user feedback and rating mechanisms for personalization, ranking, and content filtering. However, when users evaluate content contributed by fellow users (e.g., by liking a post or voting on a comment), these evaluations create complex social feedback effects. This paper investigates how ratings on a piece of content affect its author’s future behavior. By studying four large comment-based news communities, we find that negative feedback leads to significant behavioral changes that are detrimental to the community. Not only do authors of negatively-evaluated content contribute more, but also their future posts are of lower quality, and are perceived by the community as such. Moreover, these authors are more likely to subsequently evaluate their fellow users negatively, percolating these effects through the community. In contrast, positive feedback does not carry similar effects, and neither encourages rewarded authors to write more, nor improves the quality of their posts. Interestingly, the authors that receive no feedback are most likely to leave a community. Furthermore, a structural analysis of the voter network reveals that evaluations polarize the community the most when positive and negative votes are equally split.
Ahh that's the paper on downvotes existing at all being a bad thing. I don't recall whether public vs anonymous votes was in the same paper.
Yes absolutely this needs to happen. This will be hugely helpful for establishing accountability for people who upvote awful posts.
Ngl sometimes I upvote stuff out of habit, I catch myself going back to a thread and realizing I upvoted some heinous stuff on accident lol
Yeah this happens. I treat upvotes like a “read” system. But I think there can be accounting for that in moderation decisions.
Since the for comments are downthumbed and the against comments are upthumbed on the GitHub issue, anyone who feels this way should vote accordingly there (where your votes are also public).
This is definitely going to add to the mental health problems of the type of people who obsess about this shit.
Sounds like a big potential for harassment. The drama sounds fun, and so do the bits, but we already know that marginalized groups struggle with harassment on lemmy. I'd want to hear from people who are more knowledgable of how harassment works on lemmy or have experienced it to learn what their concerns are.
I think this would reduce it, at least in trans positive spaces. We could hunt down transphobes and ban them easier, which defederates their votes.
I’d like mods to be able to see it. If I imagine an interaction with a random user commenting on my upvotes, I can’t help but imagine this being the most tiring person in the world.
Admin can already see them
They're probably saying tiring shit anyway about your comment history or w/e if they got to the point of trawling that.
As well as being poor for opsec, without a very clear use case, I think this would just create more anxiety in people. I don't see it making for a happier nicer community.
Broke: Making upvotes public so people are held accountable over what they upvote.
Woke: Taking away upvotes so people have to comment if they agree with a post.
People have to like my posts enough to want to stamp their names publically by voting them? Gonna find out who's brave enough to be seen upbearing autistic nerd shit.
This really should be the norm. If you look at old phpbb sites and the like generally when you “like” or “find a post helpful” or whatever they call it they will list the users who have liked a post.
This whole anonymous voting thing is again a redditism that lemmy devs need to break free from.
I say Do it, when the admins here did it to ban all the transphobes a year ago it made the site way better, plus i dont think it will reduce votes.
If you want to publicly support a statement, that's what comments are for. Upvotes are for privately agreeing with statements or marking them as read.
Remove upbears along with downbears. Return to forum posting.
but keep the bear to click on even if it does nothing, like the chat gem in diablo 2
since his comments on the Olympics were made public
No. Please don't. I don't want that info and I don't want to participate in a site where everyone else is looking at that info. I don't care that it's already technically available, it shouldn't be default
IDK basically our votes were nonconsensually used to police behavior by mods back in the @TransComrade69@hexbear.net days and it made me feel real prickly even though I didn't really have anything to fear. I've basically assumed my votes were as good as public this whole time with the assumption mods could on-a-dime choose them to be.
I think HB has an echo chamber problem and I don't think this kind of policy helps that at all.
I'm going to be real with you. I've been able to see all votes on lemmy publicly for years. You should just make them public, because I've been scraping you and collecting statistics on how much you use bots.
Just make them public or I'm the only one who can do this. Your choice. Being helpful for fun here.
Honestly I'd always heard that Lemmy votes were public from the very beginning. This is the first I've heard that they're "supposed to be" private.
This absolutely should happen. Make people accountable without the need for moderation action.
Oh this is gonna be really funny if it happens
Stoked to open up all new ways to dunk on people
I think it's a bad idea but I don't have the energy to argue.
I've upvoted every single bad post on this site and I fear being hunted Wild Wild West style via saw blades magnetically called to my location, so I have mixed opinion on this.
Then again, perhaps I'll find out the massive amount of girls upvoting my posts. That'd be cool.
An average user absolutely benefits from being able to see who voted on a post or comment and what their vote was. A person noticing that someone is actively down voting their content in a deliberate way empowers the user to have it dealt with. Mods might not queue into that kind of targeted harassment.
All these comments comparing a vote on Lemmy to a vote within a democratic election are incredibly juvenile frankly. Its reductionist when saying Electoralism is equivalent to a Lemmy Vote and egotistical when saying a Lemmy Vote is equivalent to a ballot cast in a democratic election.
Your vote isn't private in either case regardless. At most you need to know someone's birthday, first name, and last name to find someone's voting record in America (might depend state by state). Someone willing to set up a Lemmy instance to see your votes is also capable of then setting up bots to specifically target you with down votes, which is the more egregious of the two actions.
Given the ease in which someone could create a bot network for the purpose of targeting someone or a group of people with a downvote campaign, I think it's only just to allow regular users the power to see votes and act on that information. Why should this information be gate kept to only the technically capable?
Keeping votes "hidden" maintains a kind of voyeuristic experience for those with the power or technical knowledge and resources while maintaining this illusion of privacy for the masses.
Make them visible to all.
Also why is this discussion being had on github and not lemmy? The pros and cons is more of a community concern than a programmatic one.