this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2023
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I think there's something to be said for it being public. If someone's downvoting all of your content for no reason without engaging with it, that's obviously not someone worth your time and it may be a decent idea to just block them. I could also imagine some communities making it explicitly against the rules to downvote constructive comments for no reason, for instance.
At any rate, my understanding is that the actions must be at least publicly accessible in order for federation to work, so the only thing that Kbin could do is simply not openly display that data. Perhaps making it less accessible would reduce the temptation to look, but it'll always be available to anyone who truly wants to see.
Yes, on par I lean towards it being a good thing as publicly available information rather than shadowy mud-slinging. I had one post downvoted by someone who apparently has done nothing else before or since, which takes a bit of the sting out of it. There will probably be debates about it at some point, and probably the occasional tit-for-tat attacks around the place, but overall I think it does link a bit more identity to the person who does the up- or down-voting which creates more of a community feel instead of hiding behind total anonymity.
The data is accessible by nature, and we will probably soon have scripts and extension which will trigger a war of downvotes and counter-downvotes and bot attrition.
The easy solution to half of that is to just eliminate down votes. I don't think they're anywhere near as useful as people seem to want to believe.
I disagree with you.
I've seen downvoting used very often to very quickly make trolls, spam, and highly offensive attacks disappear at the bottom.
I've not seen that on the Fediverse yet, but I have definitely seen comments that were merely unpopular opinions being heavily downvoted.
I'm thinking this might be a nice user-configurable option. If you don't think downvotes are valuable, disable them for yourself and you'll see the site as if downvotes didn't exist. Maybe another option could eliminate voting entirely, which would solve the privacy concerns too.
This may be a really dumb idea, but since the data is already publicly available and easily viewable on kbin what about going a step further and require or at least make it possible to attach reason to the upvote/downvote? A lot of the times people don't have the same standard and common understanding of why other people up/downvote. This could perhaps keep it more civil and make the votes more meaningful. It could possibly discourage people from mass downvoting spree or discourage trolls.
There is something to be said for sorting indicators being local-only. It increases the value of the local server population. This would increase privacy by not needed to transmit that information across the network. It would also decrease the burden on instances to processes those remote actions.
It would probably make large communities unparsable from small instances, though.