this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2023
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Because when I downvote an asshole, I don't want them to know I'm doing it so they can bite me about it.
Or maybe I'm a little nervous to post something, like an unpopular opinion, but someone else said it, and I want to send them a little support (+1). But if you can just find all my upvotes then now I'm nervous about what I upvote because I don't want to get cancelled.
Votes are supposed to be anonymous.
They're not "supposed" to be anything, different contexts have different voting styles.
In the case of the Fediverse it's not technically feasible to make them anonymous. Even if a particular instance hides them they still get sent out to other instances and one of those could make it public.
@Digital_Eclipse@lemmy.dbzer0.com that door swings both ways; people can downvote you without any accountability. What if you want to bite them? What if an anonymous army of downvoters brigades all your posts with downvotes? You'd have no way of knowing who to block.
In the first situation, I'd scowl and grumble for a couple of seconds and then move on and forget about it, like a mature adult would do.
In the second, I'd wonder at first what I'm saying to make people downvote me, and if it continued, I'd assume it was a troll with a bunch of alts, and I'd either ignore it or bring the mods'/admin's attention to it. Like a mature adult would do.
The problem is, a lot of people are not mature, whether or not they're adults, and they seem to think downvotes are a personal attack. Downvotes don't hurt anything but a useless number on my screen. Being harangued and harassed for having a dissenting opinion does.
This, all of this. I'm very shy and not great with words (case in point, this barely-coherent ramble), especially when I have to defend an argument. A lot of times, I get cowed into backing down and shutting up when people express even a little displeasure with what I say, and when I don't, it's either because it's one of the few topics I feel extremely passionate and knowledgeable about or because the other person said something that made my hackles rise.
No joke, about 75% of the time when I write out a comment, I second-guess myself and end up not posting it at all--even when they're benign jokes or whatever, I still worry that people will think my comment is stupid. With an anonymized voting system like Reddit's, I still got to express my opinion without fear.*
But here, or rather anywhere with public voting records, I'm right back to being afraid of expressing my opinion. Not to be melodramatic, but I'm de facto being silenced because I don't want to be dogpiled by people who think my opinion sucks. Downvotes are annoying but harmless. Harassment is not.
I'm okay with the admin being able to see everyone's voting records, to combat brigading or whatever. Less so with mods, because for every fair mod, there's a circlejerky one, but I'd accept that compromise. Not at all okay with everybody being able to see them.
*Whether or not agreement and disagreement was what Reddit's upvote and downvote were for, it was what everyone used them for, and TBF, I didn't downvote people I disagreed with who accepted that their opinion wasn't the only valid one. There are a lot of people who aren't like that, though, and not in the harmless downvote kind of way. I left one sub because I discovered either the majority of people there, or a very vocal minority, rabidly hated my favorite character from that series and regularly viciously derided anyone who liked him, claiming that even sympathizing with a morally-grey fictional character made you a bad person in real life. Nobody knew he was my favorite character because I fortunately didn't say anything about it before I discovered they hated him and wasn't brave enough to speak up afterwards, but before I left, I could defend my stance by downvoting the worst takes and upvoting the few dissenters. I couldn't have done that if votes were public.