Why are you personally against lemmy allowing users to see who upvoted/downvoted?
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.
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.
To me, a downvote means "what you wrote contributes nothing to the discussion, and should be less visible". If someone downvotes me, I take it as a sign that no further discussion in that direction is meaningful.
I completely agree, you've summed up my view far better than I could.
There's also a controversial approach that if you're debating with someone and you believe in the points you're making then you should upvote even the comments you disagree.
By doing so the full thread of comments is ranked higher so more people see the incredibly clever points you're articulating.
This isn't so relevant on Lemmy right now because it's still small so you might read all comments on ba post. But it made a massive difference on reddit where there were thousands of comments. So the algorithm becomes very selective.
You aren't just downvoting comments you disagree with, you're downvoting comments because you don't understand them.
By downvoting instead of commenting you never open that discussion to learn about somebody's view.
And by downvoting you're reducing the chance that somebody else might see the comment. Who either does understand it, or responds to continue the discussion.
To go with the theme of this thread, I have no interest in debating why I downvoted you, nor if downvotes should be used for any reason. What I didn't get is why you would (or not I guess since you replied) disengage with someone that downvoted you.
My actual question that you can't seem to answer was: now that you know I downvoted your comment (the information you've been advocating for), now what? What are you going to do with that information now that you have it? Why is it so important to you to have it?
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.