Currently, almost anyone in the Fediverse can see Lemmys votes. Lemmy admins can see votes, as well as mods. Only regular Lemmy users can’t. Should the Lemmy devs create a way to make the votes anonymous?
There is a discussion going on right now considering “making the Lemmy votes public” but I think that premisse is just wrong. The votes are public already, they’re just hidden from Lemmy users. Anyone from a kbin/mbin/fedia instance can check out the votes if they are so inclined.
The users right now may fall into a false sense of privacy when voting because the votes are hidden from Lemmy users. If you want to vote something and not show up on the vote list, please create another account to support that type of content and don’t tell anyone.
Not only is it not hard to imagine its easy to imagine the benefits of using this information automatically. I could imagine a client side script which re-ordered content based on who I trusted who had up or down voted it.
So I have users A B C D E F who are known to me who have voted on a given post. D and E are idiots I disregard their votes. F literally hates everything I love so I count his votes inversely. A and B are fantastic I count them x10 I tend to agree with C so I count his x2.
Not only can I potentially re-score threads and comments based on whom I trust I can if I really trust someone’s opinion apply their weights as well, and the weights of the folks upstream.
Yes, I too salivate at the idea that I could simply disappear all of the ideas I disagree with, but that is exactly how to turn a community into an echo chamber.
What you are suggesting here is, as I’m understanding it, a way to only get feedback from people you agree with and to never experience a critical discussion of ideas based on their merits.
Now, I’m not here to suggest that Lemmy is some kind of shining beacon of drama-free intellectualism, where every idea is discussed without bias or agenda, but I DO think it is valuable to hear from people whose lived experiences led them to a different conclusion than the one I’ve reached. Obviously there needs to be a mechanism to remove trolls from the discussion, but I fear a world where we only see content that we agree with, because then we will truly be removed from reality, and that’s not why I’m here.