/kbin meta

I personally think making people explain why they downvoted something is more conducive than just....being dogpiled with no explanation.

There are very shy people like me who have to sit and work up their courage to post any comment, much less a dissenting one. (Edit: Or else yolo it and regret it later, like I kind of did with this one.) I'd have at least 4x (probably closer to 10x) the number of comments I have back on Reddit if I posted every comment I wrote and then ended up chickening out and not posting. And I've never commented on a heated thread where I disagreed with the popular opinion (or, at least, not about me disagreeing).

Anonymous upvotes and downvotes allow shy cowards like me to express our opinions in a small way without the fear of being attacked for them. Are they abused by assholes? Yes, but everything is. Assholes shit on everything, it's their way. Like I said in another comment, though I wouldn't be happy about it, I'd be willing to compromise by letting mods see voting history to prevent rampant abuse.

if having to downvote out loud makes people think twice because they don't want anyone knowing they disagree with X, maybe that's a good habit to reassess.

I don't want anybody knowing I, personally, disagree with X because I might be harassed for it, but I want people to know that somebody disagrees with it and they're not just in a big circlejerk. I said in another comment under this post that I used to be in a subreddit where I belatedly discovered a large number of people despised my favorite character and thought people who liked him were bad people because they liked him, or liked him because they were bad people, or something, I don't know. Either way, I certainly wasn't brave or stupid enough to go in there and argue, but being able to downvote the worst comments--before I realized how prevalent they were and left the sub--gave me some measure of agency there. I wouldn't be able to do the same thing here.

The best argument I've seen for anonymizing it is having that information appropriated by corporations. Which admittedly they could just gather from your posts if they wanted to.

With anonymized voting, if you're careful to not say anything that gives away your location, they're not going to pinpoint where you are, beyond a broad area. With public voting, if you go to your town's magazine and upvote a bunch of stuff, they're going to know exactly where you are. That goes for anything else you might not want them or anyone else to know about you. They can certainly build a more complete psychological profile with both your comments and your voting history than with just your comments. And I know a lot of people don't care about privacy anymore, and I think that's a tragedy.

it's legitimately made me analyze whether I'm only doing it to be a dick

I have withheld downvotes that I would have handed out if they were anonymous, and I'll eventually probably also withhold upvotes that I might have given if I could do it without the public endorsement.

It's driving me to only vote on things where I could actually articulate a reason that I'm willing to stand by.

And I haven't entirely made up my mind if that's a good thing, but we've all seen the cesspool of Reddit vote-brigades and I'm certainly open to trying something different.

Good link. It'll be interesting to see where it goes. I think this really comes down to a question of "Does the Fediverse even have to capability of federating user actions without indicating what user did the action?"

Plus, if you can muster up some solution, is that solution then easily falsifiable? Ie could a server send thousands of automated fake downvotes that don't actually tie to a specific handle? How would a receiving server know that some anonymous vote is a real vote? etc

Challenging problems.

Thanks. Didn't notice it when I browsed through.

Hold up down vote is not for something I don't like or disagree with but for content thats irrelevant... I don't downvote everything I disagree with but I definitely use it for that...

Agree, we also discussed about this here.

@34 lol for being meta!

It is technically infeasible to make the votes anonymous in a federated protocol like this. Even if a particular instance chooses to hide them, the votes still get sent out to other instances with identities attached.

The only way I can think of to allow anonymized voting in a decentralized manner involves the dreaded word "blockchain", that would result in my comment being downvoted reflexively and me being called a "crypto bro" or something. And it would be complicated, and lots of people are already complaining about the Fediverse being too complicated for them.

I'm not sure there IS a way to prevent that, that isn't removing the ability to vote/boost/whatever entirely. The names of puppet accounts being visible doesn't stop them from puppetting, I would think, especially when it's mixed with real people.

If there is a way to sort and promote content, that way will be abused. And I would be curious about a content aggregator's ability to deliver interesting content and deal with spam without the means to properly sort.

Frivously downvoted dis. 👨🏻‍🎨

On the other, following somebody around and downvoting them everywhere they go is also a real form of harassment that happens on Reddit and other places where you can vote anonymously.

There something to be said about how making something harder to see can still have merit. But on the other hand, that just means that the average person won't realize it's a thing but hardcore users and determined people will.

...I also wonder how long it'll be before we have some subreddit that automatically bans people based on their voting. Downvote a mod's comment? That's a banning. Upvote a post in a sub's mortal nemesis? That's a banning. Downvote a comment that the mod decides didn't fit their definition of how downvotes should be used? You better believe that's a banning.