Im not sure if I agree. All it takes is one weirdo who now knows you down-voted their one link/discussion/comment and now you have someone stalking you. At least with the current system its not explicit, so only the truly dedicated can find that out.
The truly dedicated can: spin up their own instance, host a bunch of content, wait for you to downvote, then check the logs. Much work to find someone to stalk :)
Whereas I just select someone at random to stalk. Like @Track_Shovel @[email protected] They're a dirty miner! Ewwwww. ;)
I'm mostly just really impressed that the summon worked across at least three instances. I'm lemmy.ca, this post is on lemmy.world, and you're probably reading and replying on slrpnk.net -- maybe this lemmy federation thing is actually working haha :)
Yep takes a bit of work ATM and doesn't seem worth it. At least right now. I would imagine having years worth of data could be worth money to advertisers. (reddit...etc)
On kbin all votes are public and you can view who down voted or upvoted someone as if it was like Facebook. I've seen people try to call out others for down voting something on there. Mbin is a fork and has the same functionality.
You're asking to engage and interact with a public space (voting is interacting) which defines and creates the tone with complete anonymity. That's not how a conversation or public debate works and is only new to the internet. I think it's been a negative (if we are suppose to view a downvote as only off-topic or spam). No spam bot would bother stalking you, anyone else would be outed with 2 clicks and can be blocked or probably better reported so they're not stalking others on the platform who do comment with their username attached. This is outing the abusers, who would abuse regardless if it's you or the OP.
Anonymity online, much like secret ballots in ancient Greece and other societies, is designed to protect individuals from harassment and bias, encouraging a more diverse participation. Downvoting isn't just for spam but also reflects disagreement, and removing anonymity could discourage honest expression. Instead of exposing users, which risks harm, improving moderation and reporting tools is a more balanced approach.
And one of my posts is literally being used as an example by the larger community.
ok so we are to the crux of the argument, "What is a Downvote?" I believe that the "downvote" is being abused as the lowest form of comment disagreement. I don't care to ponder on why someone clicks to disagree with absolutely no other input. I would rather the scores be completely removed if this is a tinder style opinion based polling voting system. I strongly believe people using downvotes for disagreement harms honest expression more than a thought out comment someone can actually understand without guessing.