Question I'd like to hear everyone's thoughts on possibly making votes public. This has been discussed in a lot of other issues, but here's a dedicated one for discussion. Positives Could help figh...
Probably better to post in the github issue rather than replying here.
Any admin can already review voting activity, but some people don’t realize that. This change would make it less surprising
it would make it easier for non-admin users to study voting activity and find abuse
it would make it consistent with other platforms that we federate with, which can already see votes
Potential downsides:
People will report voting activity that they don’t like, even if it’s not malicious.
Admins will need to set up rules on what activity they will act on (and also take action against people that spam bad reports).
It would also help to have automated tools to review voting activity since it’s hard to do that manually.
It’s another option for abuse, similar to bringing up past comment history
Both could be dealt with but it would make moderation somewhat harder
Likely bad:
Mods and admins can ban people for upvoting content in communities they aren’t in charge of. This might work on a small scale, but I’d caution against it because it often misses nuance:
it’s very easy to accidentally vote on something while scrolling (unless there is a consistent pattern)
even if the community is seen as “bad”, the post might be good (ex. it could be calling out the community)
Bad
it lowers the barrier for other types of abuse, such as tracking vote activity for advertising, approximating when a user is asleep, etc
Gathered some thoughts here
Potential positives:
Potential downsides:
People will report voting activity that they don’t like, even if it’s not malicious.
It’s another option for abuse, similar to bringing up past comment history
Both could be dealt with but it would make moderation somewhat harder
Likely bad:
Bad