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.