This could be some incentive for up-voting relevant topics. Maybe also a tag indicating a commenting user has joined the community they are posting in?

    • DessalinesA
      2·
      4 years ago

      Up and down voting was originally not invented as a feature to drive user-engagement or signal approval, but as a way to crowd-source link curation in an largely non-moderated internet forum. I think it is good to keep that original function in mind and design the features around that. So looking from that perspective it is better to have votes anonymous I think.

      This is my thinking as well. Of course when ranking, there’s trade-offs between transparency ( which does promote approval-seeking behavior, because it shows ), mental health, and privacy, so we have to be careful about how much info about votes we expose. It’d pry be fine if we had an upvotes page that was private to you, but I don’t think it’d be a good idea to show that to others.

  • tronk
    6·
    4 years ago

    This sounds like a good way of getting a better idea of who you’re talking to.

    But I dislike the idea of things becoming parochial. For example, “He just joined the community two days ago! What is he talking about?” Or “Keep out of this community. If you’re not part of it don’t bring your uninformed opinion here!” In my case, I like the idea of pseudonimity being the only thing people know of me. Not even my karma is immediately visible to people. Just my pseudonym.

    Similarly, sometimes I want to comment on something without up-voting it. The reason is that up-votes mean different things to me at different moments. Sometimes I up-vote because I like the content and I want to signal that.* Other times, I’m not particularly pumped by something but I think it’s important, as in it’s important for others to see. And yet other times, I am part of discussions and yet I actually down-vote the post because I think it’s not a topic that I’d like others to see (don’t worry, I didn’t do this with your post! Nor do I with the vast majority of posts). Other times I don’t do anything; I comment without touching votes.

    But when I do vote, part of why I do it is because I know my vote will be aggregated. I trust that it’s kept private.

    * Funnily enough, I don’t think I’ve ever encountered a post I straight up dislike. I guess I’ve found them all interesting or haven’t bothered to down-vote? However, comments can sometimes be sour— those I do down-vote when I dislike them, mainly the style, not always the content.

  • AgreeableLandscape
    6·
    4 years ago

    I like the Reddit way of doing it where the user has pages which lists what they’ve upvoted and downvoted, but they can choose not to display it to other users in the settings.

    • kevincox
      3·
      4 years ago

      Is this information actually private in Lemmy? Since it is federated there will need to be some information exposed. If it is aggregated by server there may be some obfuscation but I don’t think it is impossible to keep this information completely private.