I remember that being a problem back on Reddit (though I always found people upvoting low-effort stuff that wasn't community/sub-appropriate to be more of a problem). It's kind of a site-wide UX issue though really, if a new casual user is just presented with a list of posts then they might genuinely be unaware of (or perhaps just uninterested in) where they came from and what their votes mean.

1y ago

You can see who upvoted and downvoted a post by viewing it in friendica.

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smeg @feddit.uk 1y ago

Oh. If the only thing stopping the votes being public is a label saying pretty please don't make this public then it does seem very open to abuse.

1y ago

You can see who upvoted and downvoted a post by viewing it in friendica.

Jump

smeg @feddit.uk 1y ago

Some people might think it's not interesting because it's not appropriate content for that community, and that by downvoting they are improving the quality for everyone. I don't think every instance/community has a unified consensus on how exactly to use voting, and some people are always going to do their own thing regardless.

1y ago

You can see who upvoted and downvoted a post by viewing it in friendica.

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smeg @feddit.uk 1y ago

If you'd only ever interacted with Lemmy and not read up on how ActivityPub works then that's a reasonable assumption, it's not like anything (that I've noticed!) actually tells you that your votes are public, and they don't look to be public in the places you're likely to see!

1y ago

You can see who upvoted and downvoted a post by viewing it in friendica.

Jump

smeg @feddit.uk 1y ago

I think the issue is that many Lemmy users will think more carefully about what they comment than what they up/downvote, as a comment appears connected to your username but a vote doesn't. You might decide against commenting on something you disagree with because you don't want to get in a fight, instead just downvoting it, but if people then know if was you who downvoted can still pick the fight.

Basically the issue is you're revealing a lot more information than you might initially have realised if you'd have known votes were public all along. Maybe a disgruntled person uses that to dox you, or maybe a corpo feeds all that information into their fancy computer system to work out who you might be, who knows.