I don’t expect my votes to be private, but I will vote as if they were. People reading too much into why someone might have voted a certain way and trying to shame them for it is embarrassing, I’m not going to constrain myself to reasons for voting that are immediately legible to anyone via only one bit of information just for their sake. If I want to downvote something with, for instance, a political message I agree with but the person phrased it in a way that goes against my pet peeves, I’m gonna do that, and I think the ideal would be for these numbers not to be taken very personally or seriously.

So basically I’d say it’s bad taste to put it in a UI, but only so far as it encourages people to be weird about it, and ultimately that’s on them.

On a privacy scale of 1 to 100: 2.

Mods can see it, all someone has to do is spin up a private instance and they can see it too, plus there’s Lemvotes. It’s kinda neat like I can see that I upvoted 8,052 posts and downvoted 17 from that account, or from this account I upvoted 15,327 comments and downvoted 86.

Some instances though - like PieFed.social - have defederated from Lemvotes, so anyone’s vote offered to a community on that instance will not be counted by Lemvotes. But ofc that’s merely one of many tools for me to find the data, whereas if someone spins up their own instance then they - or a community mod - can still see it by other means.

The reason I went into all this detail is bc if is relevant to your purpose that not everyone on the Threadiverse shares the same view about vote privacy. Some instances will defederate from yours in an attempt to retain control over the visibility of votes from their own. So perhaps you can devise some mechanism to allow admins the choice to opt-out, without having to defederate from your entire instance wholesale?

Personally, I don’t care too much about my votes being public. I vote very thoughtfully and try to upvote posts and comments that add to the community and I downvote misinformation.

But, I think people should be able to choose. I do think there are many valid reason for them to be private.

Zero. Use this site with a VPN and assume any data you put on here is being harvested.

zero, it’s on the internet, it:s not “private”

I wish my votes were even more public. If I’ve taken the time to downvote your bullshit/nonsense, I want you to know it was me. Same with upvotes.

On Lemmy? As others have said, they’re automatically federated and so anyone can see them.

On Piefed though? I have a user setting where I can choose whether my votes federate and I can override that default on a given post if I choose with a hot key. That’s how it should be. IMHO, more of y’all should use Piefed.

Not at all, and I believe that’s the point.

No idea. I don’t like public voting and only do it on rare occasions. I was doing it a lot to get rid of things from my feed but rimu put in a read button so now Im back to almost never doing it.

Data has to federate, so nothing is going to really be private like you mention. I think it’s unreasonable to expect anything otherwise. I don’t see a point to hiding votes because of this. If someone starts stalking or harassing their voters for some reason, have a reporting system and handle that.

They are not, it’s akin to shouting in the rain. Most people will be inside not getting wet, but there people that either like the rain, or get paid to stand in it

The lemmy vote viewer is quite limited but I suspect that there are a few servers that have spun their own DB queries and charting:

[edit spelling]

Lemvotes shows votes. So, it’s not private.

They’re not private at all, I’ve never been under the illusion that they were.

I like it, have some guts, stand on business. If people want to downvote they should be willing to attach their name to it, internet points are fake anyway.

I thought there was a user search that showed you what they upvoted or downvoted on. To me that could be abused by a party like the US border agents, or ads to check what type of things you’ve marked as a yay or nay

Its like sitting near a window basically, people on the sidewalk are gonna have trouble seeing you with just their eyes (i mean like most sidewalks are quite far away to the window because of front yards) but anyone could get a camera with zoom lens and see your face.

not. at all. i consider anything i put here akin to standing on my nearest street corner during rush hour, shouting into the darkness

confused how anyone could think anything otherwise.

Me personally I would say that private votes are better if possible. But you should be able to filter when you’re logged in what you upvoted and downvoted. That’s how I would like it ideally.