In my opinion this isn’t that big of a problem since it’s fairly hard to look at and discern

You are like one LLM prompt away from a website that makes it fairly easy to look at and discern so that’s not really a valid argument

I don’t worry about that. I have no expectation that up/downvotes be not tied to my username.

☑️ No

✅ Yes

Literally none I basically assumed that anything I do on the internet can be read by anyone at any time. I’m still a fucking freak because they’ll have to kill me to stop me from being freaky. If I die unexpectedly the government did it. Never forget that.

Completely public

Well they aren’t private and it doesn’t matter

I have no expectations of privacy on any social media, including this one. I’m here to yell my very important opinions at anyone who’ll listen.

Votes are not private and never will be.

There have been some discussions about whether Threadiverse software should only federate out the number of votes and perhaps some anonymised voter IDs, rather than information that identifies individual users. This would prevent vote snooping via sites like Lemvotes. However, even if something like that were implemented, instance admins would still be able to snoop on their own users if they so wished. So imo, it’s better to just accept that votes are public information.

Personally I don’t see the issue with it. My principle when it comes to voting is upvoting stuff I want others to see and only downvote things I don’t think anyone would want to see (like spam). So if for some odd reason someone is interested enough to check my voting history, I don’t care. What’s the worst that could happen? Someone on the internet disagrees with my votes? Oh no! How will I ever survive?!

As a side note, Lemmy’s developers seem to have a strong opinion that voter information shouldn’t be displayed publicly. For example, here’s an issue they opened in the Mbin repo. While I disagree with their stance on vote visibility, Nutomic has a valid point there: Lemmy doesn’t mark voting activity as public when federating it out, so there’s an argument to be made that other software should not display individual votes coming from Lemmy.

I don't expect much privacy on a shared public space like the fediverse. If I wanted privacy, I'd spin up a new profile every day/week, and use an external bookmark manager to save stuff

I vote by using a whiteboard marker on my monitor, that way no one can steal my lucky charms.

From the technical side anyone can spin up their own Lemmy instance and view all votes,

Or just view them on lemvotes.org.

Stand by your vote.

Nothing I do on the Fediverse is private lmao.

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.