I recently learned that voting on lemmy is not anonymous. Anyone can get information about who has upvoted and downvoted a post or comment.
In combination with your IP, this is a massive privacy (maybe even physical security) risk. Also, people can target you for your votes.
Sadly, this is something where I would prefer Reddit over Lemmy. Big tech scrapes data from both places anyways, at least Reddit is safe.
Public votes do absolutely nothing to stop people from making a bunch of users on a bunch of instances and voting from those users. Voting agents are a simple solution to the issue, since you can still just ban the voting agent if it seems problematic.
But there’s a deeper context here, which is we are drawing a weird line between voting being a fundamental, if not critical part of the application, but also apparently grounds for imposing sanctions on users for doing it wrong? That’s a fundamentally flawed mechanic no matter how you swing it, since you can’t standardize any singular set of rules, and we are already seeing a rapid escalation of tit for tat vote bans. This is just unsustainable and is pushing things towards an obvious endpoint where there is such a chilling effect on voting that it negates the entire utility of the mechanic for sorting and content curation.
This is just further evidence that we just shouldn’t have a downvote option at all.
I agree, except we should leave the basic mechanic and just make it a placebo.
Why? I don’t see a benefit to the button at all. Even being able to register disapproval is better done via comment, anyway, and having to articulate it makes you far more likely to self-reflect and temper yourself than if you can just downvote every comment in a thread
No, downvotes are more important than upvotes
I legitimately don’t even know why someone might think this.