I woke up today, to a public comment in a Lemmy community asking a series of tagged accounts why they had downvoted certain posts

I thought that reactions to posts and comments are anonymous and now I don’t really know what to feel about Lemmy any more.

In this case I had downvoted a poster because of its design, but was confronted publicly for being racist because the person assumed that I downvoted the message on the poster

EDIT: changed the title from “How” to “Why” because it broke rule nr 5 about it being a support question

  • gigachad@piefed.socialEnglish
    211·
    7 hours ago

    I was sceptic of the open concept at first. But now I find it appealing, because comment and post history are also public. If people wanted, they could probably extract my living place, job, sexual preferences and political opinions from my comment history of 1,000 comments. So why hide the up- and down votes?

    • cosmicrookie@lemmy.worldOP
      132·
      6 hours ago

      This is the point though. Its it’s hidden by the platform, I feel like exposing it in public is against the sentiment

      If voting was public through Lemmy and its clients, it would be more open and not only partly anonymous

      I had assumed that if voting activity was meant to be public, there would have been a feed like the mod logs, for each users activity

      • gigachad@piefed.socialEnglish
        18·
        6 hours ago

        That’s true, but I think this is more of a development thing than an actual aim of Lemmy. Due to the nature of federation, everything must be open. As the Software is strongly inspired by Reddit, transparent votes is something that is technically exposed via the API but not yet implemented in the UI. But I think any app developer could integrate this into their app if they liked. It seems like Mbin chose a different path way.

        In general, there is no congruent sentiment in Lemmy development, but I agree there should be one or it should be discussed with the community. Have you looked if there is an already ongoing discussion on git?

        I care more about PieFed, but I don’t know how they look on the topic though.

        • jj4211@lemmy.world
          9·
          4 hours ago

          I just think it should be more obviously transparent, rather than the UI pretending it has no attribution.

          I recall some proposal about adding the info to the UI and objections due to privacy concerns, which is just pretending something is private.