By that I mean that you should be able to drill into post and comment votes, and see the users.
Votes for me are really just a temperature gauge, for me to see if the content I’m posting is appreciated by a community. Other than that, they don’t actually seem to have too much impact on this platform, likely because of scale and algorithm (or lack there of).
That being said, I’ve noticed some mild, weird “turf war” style downvote brigading of community posts. Not botting per say, but deliberate and individual shitty behavior. It’s ultimately no more than a mild annoyance, but I think transparency into the social voting behavior of users would encourage accountability.
Rabble rabble anonymity though!
There’s no actual impact to a user’s anonymity. There’s just less of a free pass to act shitty and not get the boot from a community, under whatever moniker and internet personality type you choose.
First, votes aren’t exactly transparent, but they also aren’t completely private either. User voting records are stored in databases that instance owners have access to, so it’s possible for them to see (and/or even publish) up/down voting history. KBin already does this publicly. So I can see an argument being made that if the info is available to some people, it should be available to all people.
Personally, I wouldn’t care if my upvotes and downvotes are exposed to the commenters/posters that I voted on, but I’m concerned about the possibility of it being used for discrimination. Imagine me following/participating in a community and then being immediately banned from that community solely because a community moderator didn’t like how I upvoted/downvoted on things. For example, say I want to participate in a philosophy or politic themed community and one of the mods there just happens to be very conservative and decides to exclude me just because I upvoted something that was NSFW once upon a time and they disapproved of that behavior? This will absolutely happen if all voting is public. On reddit, a similar form of discrimination happened by analyzing where people posted and they would be banned from certain subreddits just based on the other subreddits they have been active on- and even worse was that this was often done by a bot without regard for the actual comments made. I recall a very specific example of someone who used to hop into r/conservative to challenge or antagonize certain lines of thinking and they were banned from liberal/progressive subreddits because of their activity on r/conservative despite the fact that they were not sympathetic to anything on r/conservative. That same discrimination can (and probably does) happen on Lemmy already, but making voting history public will take it to the next level.
If voting ever did become public on lemmy, then at a minimum users should be able to see/review/audit their voting history and be given the ability to retroactively delete some/all of it.
You’re also ignoring the fact that it’s trivial to create/use alternate lemmy accounts. If voting records were public, it would just drive people to create multiple accounts from which to vote on things - to compartmentalize their interactions with different communities or users. Since this fact means that users would STILL be able to hide/mask their voting history, I think this is a good argument that it makes no logical sense to make voting records public.
I think an ideal solution would be for users to just have a choice to make their voting public or to keep it private, or to selectively publicize or keep secret on a vote-by-vote bases.