Edit: obligatory explanation (thanks mods for squaring me away)…

What you see via the UI isn’t “all that exists”. Unlike Reddit, where everything is a black box, there are a lot more eyeballs who can see “under the hood”. Any instance admin, proper or rogue, gets a ton of information that users won’t normally see. The attached example demonstrates that while users will only see upvote/downvote tallies, admins can see who actually performed those actions.

Edit: To clarify, not just YOUR instance admin gets this info. This is ANY instance admin across the Fediverse.

  • Pastor HaggisEnglish
    2•1 year ago

    Exactly. In that case, you have a meme that’s literally just about how Nazis are trying to get into the Fediverse. The fact that Nazis exist is a terrible thing, and both the beauty and the downside of the Fediverse is that they can make their own platform for that garbage. So a lot of people, and maybe rightfully so, might say we shouldn’t give them publicity so they downvote the post thinking that they’re in the right. Others might upvote the post because it’s a funny meme (which it is). Regardless, you now have people who can be “targeted” for agreeing with Nazis because they chose to vote the way they do.

    Downvotes being public can lead to one of two things happening.

    1. If people start making a big deal out of it, people might be less likely to downvote others. This can lead to discussion that isn’t moderated by the people because the people don’t want to take flak if they aren’t with the “hivemind”.
    2. On the other hand, it may also lead to an increase in good discussion because people aren’t disliking everything just for disagreeing with it. Maybe you won’t see comments about vaccines get downvoted because they don’t want others to attack them for their views.

    I think the former is much more likely than the latter, but then part of me believes that maybe it’ll lead to better discussion because you might be called on to defend your views more often. If you hate abortion and downvote a comment, you might now need to defend that stance which can potentially open up the discussion.

    Ultimately, it’ll depend on the Lemmy community. If we’re just Reddit 2.0 (or 3.0 or 4.0 depending on how you look at it), then I think public downvotes can lead to worse conversation as bots and assholes target people who disagree. Inversely, if we are a better community that is more interested in discussion, then it could lead to better discussions overall. Looking over at any of the politics/news communities leads me to think it’s more of the latter, but the more niche communities seem to be much better.

    I guess time will tell how it turns out.