Why are you personally against lemmy allowing users to see who upvoted/downvoted?

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

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 could be doing anything else with their lives, but decided 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.
- 100% agreed.
  
  I wish people would respond to the comment, not the commenter.
- 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.

I don't have a strong opinion on the matter, but it really seems like it would encourage stalking and revenge-downvotes.

The thing about any stalking and revenge downvotes is that everybody would be able to immediately see exactly what was happening, due to the added transparency. Rules could very easily be made against this. So, when I see this argument it strikes me as a bit of a red herring.

What I think is really going on, is some people want to be able to stalk and downvote bomb without being recognized, which the current system allows.
- Now I really wanna go investigate who downvoted this comment
- How would such rules work across federation?
  
  Sure, one instance can make their rules regarding it. But if everything they federate with ignore them, do they have to exclude all federated votes? Would they have to filter all votes according to some technical-representable rules?

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.

https://piefed.social/post/205362
- Oh, neat!

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.

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). 🤨
- 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.
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.

It'd probably lead to lots of small drama and every disagreement getting to a personal level. It's speculation at this point. I also think a decent chunk of people here aren't able to behave nicely. I'm not sure if we should grant them additional capabilities.

But it's not like voting here on Lemmy were the pinnacle of technical advances... It's an echo chamber for popular opinions and common and often uninspiring interests. I think we could change how it works, as it's not super great in the first place.

Agreed. What's your pet solution?
- Uh, it'd need to be either a complicated algorithm. I mean I'm often not interested in meme pictures and political news. I'd like the one niche hobby electronics project to float to the top for me. And they're just not so popular. So I don't see how voting would work for me in the first place. The other thing that works very well is having separate communities for topics. I can just subscribe to the electronics, disregard the world politics. I think that already helps me half the way. Also multireddits(?) or seperate feeds help. And I don't really have a good solution for the rest of it, yet. For the comments, i really don't know. Lots of good answers here don't even have any votes cast on them.

It leads to low quality communities banning people who downvote their posts, artificially inflating their engagement metrics

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.

If you want to read up on people's objections, there's load of comments at https://lemmy.world/post/18805474 and the GitHub Issue it links to at https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/4967

I'm not personally in favour of ideas about voting privacy (I think it's a bit anti-Fediverse and hampers backfilling), but those who disagree tend to feel more strongly about it than I do, so I try to avoid arguments about it.

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.

There's certain content that will always get downvoted.
If communities were standing alone, that idea would work. But communities are hosted and shared on an instance. I find it questionable in that context; it's a slippery slope.

Should an instance's users be able to vote on every community they see in their local feed, or should only community members be able to? Instance admins may decide a community does not violates instance rules, while users may feel like it does not fit the spirit or goals or mentality of an instance.

It could work if only community members can vote in their communities. Then you could make community-specific decisions and consequences, and the border of instance and community would be separated by definition.

Who says I am?

Votes don't matter. They are the hide button of Lemmy.

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

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.

Just wish there were more transparency around counts and content engagement.

Sure dude, I bet that's the only reason.

Imagine raging against the dude who downvoted you. That reasoning sounds more believable than "transparency". It was "that much" you had to ask a way to know WHO is downvoting you.

Imagine caring for who downvotes. How dare they.

I'd like to just see the name of the moderator that is banning me from 50 different communities they have the free time to moderate even if I've never posted in them because they disagreed with my opinion in one of them. I like to know who has skin thinner than the rice paper around a Botan candy.

The modlog is public on lemmy
- It doesn't show you who is doing the modding though as far as I've seen. I've had some anonymous .ml mods remove some of my comments while citing rules that don't exist.
If you view the modlog from an mbin instance it shows which mod took the action. The mbin modlogs aren't very good for searching through, but a recent action should be easy enough to see
it was davel and it was for being a liberal
- Yeah I figured that was the reason.
You shouldn't read too much into being banned from 50 communities - it's just a fudgy workaround for being banned from the instance.

Upvotes are public if you use mbin, not sure why downvotes are hidden

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.

edit: to my downvoter. Thank you for perfectly proving my point. The whole thread is actually asking for opinions on why each of us holds a position on upvote/downvote transparency, and you downvote my valid opinion. I don't need the vote transparency to tell me who you are, your downvote on this tells me everything I need to know about you and how to value your opinion.

I'd like to see named upvotes (if that's already a thing, sorry I'm just a casual lurker couldn't be bothered to find out)

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.

Would be cool to have this feature. More transparency=better.