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...
Probably better to post in the github issue rather than replying here.
How are harassing comments you could receive about your voting choices much different than harassing comments you could receive about the comments you make? Serious question. My instance only shows details on upvotes and not downvotes, but because the information is already public due to the ActivityPub protocol, it’s already possible (albeit taking some effort) for anyone motivated to look at those details.
In both cases, it could reach the level of moderation actions against the offending user, but if vote details are hidden then you also lose the ability as a user to notice when (for example) people or bots are following you around and downvoting all your comments indiscriminately. While moderators and admins can still look into those things currently, I feel like moderation bandwidth is already slightly strained in the Fediverse, and relying on moderator efforts to catch that kind of behavior is going to be less reliable than noticing and flagging it yourself.
It’s different because there might be some people who you always end up downvoting their comments and you don’t even realize it’s the same person because you don’t look at user names and there aren’t really that many prolific commenters here so they will see that you’re always downvoting them and assume malice in a way that they wouldn’t otherwise because they’re not going through your comments, they’re only looking at theirs.
For example, this comment just a few down:
I’m mildly curious if the single down vote I get on ~70% of my comments is from like one guy I pissed off at some point. At the same time I don’t care enough to work around the system, so maybe it works?
They immediately assume that if one person is downvoting them it is malice instead of maybe that one person just disagrees with their comments for other reasons and isn’t even looking at user names.
Edit: I just noticed you did the same thing in your comment too. There are not that many users here, just because someone is consistently downvoting your comments doesn’t mean they are following you around, there isn’t a lot of content and people who spend time here see a lot of it. Maybe they just disagree with every comment you make that they happen to see and have no idea or care who you are.
How are harassing comments you could receive about your voting choices much different than harassing comments you could receive about the comments you make? Serious question. My instance only shows details on upvotes and not downvotes, but because the information is already public due to the ActivityPub protocol, it’s already possible (albeit taking some effort) for anyone motivated to look at those details.
In both cases, it could reach the level of moderation actions against the offending user, but if vote details are hidden then you also lose the ability as a user to notice when (for example) people or bots are following you around and downvoting all your comments indiscriminately. While moderators and admins can still look into those things currently, I feel like moderation bandwidth is already slightly strained in the Fediverse, and relying on moderator efforts to catch that kind of behavior is going to be less reliable than noticing and flagging it yourself.
It’s different because there might be some people who you always end up downvoting their comments and you don’t even realize it’s the same person because you don’t look at user names and there aren’t really that many prolific commenters here so they will see that you’re always downvoting them and assume malice in a way that they wouldn’t otherwise because they’re not going through your comments, they’re only looking at theirs.
For example, this comment just a few down:
They immediately assume that if one person is downvoting them it is malice instead of maybe that one person just disagrees with their comments for other reasons and isn’t even looking at user names.
Edit: I just noticed you did the same thing in your comment too. There are not that many users here, just because someone is consistently downvoting your comments doesn’t mean they are following you around, there isn’t a lot of content and people who spend time here see a lot of it. Maybe they just disagree with every comment you make that they happen to see and have no idea or care who you are.