this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2025
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As much as I wish votes could be private, obfuscating them would make troll instances harder to notice. I think I hate it the most that the current model gives the illusion of being private, when it isn't.
Yea, the best solution is:
As long as users know that votes are not private, it should be okay.
Problem is, if it's visible to mods, it's effectively public.
This also presumes mods are, by default, inherently non-biased, held to a standard, and never have vendettas of their own.
Of all the many things reddit did poorly, choosing not to let mods see votes was an excellent decision.
Of course mods are not always like that. But if mods are like that, just go to another community. If mods are bad, just leave. On the fediverse, you "vote" with where you participate.
Public voting, or at least semi public-voting helps cultivate a high-trust culture on-site in my opinion. And being able to remove repeat offending downvoters who do it nonetheless is very useful.
I managed to discover the serial downvoters on my old lemm.ee comm and when I banned them (about 4 of them?) it had a huge impact. They didn't all downvote /everything/ but they downvoted a lot of things, and no contribution. And if they got in early, they could sink new threads. As that kind of behaviour now is more-or-less confined to non-interacting support/troll accounts, it's much rarer of a problem. Unlike Reddit when a lot of threads can quickly get downvote buried instantly for seemingly no reason.