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Comments on General discussion on making votes public

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General discussion on making votes public

+7
−1

Make vote secrecy a per-community choice, because some communities might prefer voting transparency over voting privacy.

Side-question. Why voting is secret in other Q&A platforms?


Origins in the Community Server (direct link to conversation), raw transcript follows (but expect format inconsistencies):

Transcript

Mithical
Votes are anonymous. Scrounging vote stats on profile pages to see who's cast votes on a small site to try to figure out who's downvoted something is highly discouraged, and calling people out for it is definitely over the line.

DonielF
Why are vote stats displayed on profiles?

Mithical
uploads a pic of Shrek captioned "good question"

gs
let's read the git log about it
I traced it back to the earliest user profile pages written back 5 years ago
I couldn't identify a reason, I'd guess "just because it was easily and readily available" the first living version already had that https://github.com/codidact/qpixel/commit/90a8cb1683cc90ad8bd928742c3a32d5ee761d64

cellio
When Art wrote QPixel originally he was probably thinking more along the lines of an SE clone as opposed to a new thing. Originally Codidact was going to start fresh with all new code, building from the start what we wanted to have, but that turned out to have issues. So we decided to start with QPixel and evolve it into what we want. This is one of those underlying assumptions, inherited from SE, that I'm guessing no one thought about. I think it makes sense to show voting history only to the user, not publicly.

gs
what if we went all the way around. Instead of making everything vote-secret, make everything vote-public
excuse me I ignore if there's already a meta post about it

DonielF

what if we went all the way around. Instead of making everything vote-secret, make everything vote-public

@gs NONONONONONONO

gs
why not? I mean

DonielF
Already with reactions and “me too”‘s we’ve had people say they’re only interested in voting and the like only because of anonymity involved; they don’t want it to be personal.

gs
if voting is even moar secret than in SE, there'll always be people thinking staff cheats scores

DonielF
As if scores do anything?
Also, everything is open source
There’s no way for staff to cheat votes

ShowMeBillyJo
Well, direct database manipulation - the data isn't open source

gs

Already with reactions and “me too”‘s we’ve had people say they’re only interested in voting and the like only because of anonymity involved; they don’t want it to be personal.

aha so r you basically saying it's a community choice?
and I mean a per community choice

ShowMeBillyJo
I think it'd be an interesting thought exercise to explore fully open votes, even if it doesn't get implemented

DonielF

aha so r you basically saying it’s a community choice?

@gs I’m not necessarily saying that, but I’d be comfortable with such a policy.
Look, if y’all really think this is something that should be explored, Meta awaits

gs
I'm lazy to write the post but give me a link I can upvote

Mithical
There are also some ancient forum discussions about this.

[...]

Mithical

There are also some ancient forum discussions about this

https://forum.codidact.org/t/proposal-votes-scores-and-answer-order/385/19

Relevant forum discussion: https://forum.codidact.org/t/proposal-votes-scores-and-answer-order/385/19

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General comments (11 comments)
Post
+5
−5

I know this is not a popular stance, but I agree with you.

I have seen first hand the problems caused by anonymous voting on SE, especially anonymous downvotes. Whenever there is a way to do any harm without being identified, vandals will do so, or it will be done for personal reasons and not the intended ones. This is true in the wider world, not just on line.

We have kicked around the idea of having two types of votes, signed and unsigned. The signed votes would carry more weight. Unsigned downvotes would only be displayed in a tally, but would be unable to cause harm to the author (reducing rep or any similar metric) or the post (change the score and sort order).

The main argument I've heard for anonymous votes is that people will feel more free to express their opinion. There is certainly some truth to that, but it is limited. If someone is not willing to stand behind their decision, then the value of that decision is diminished. Put another way, the few votes we might lose wouldn't have had much value anyway.

On the other side, anonymous downvotes invite vandals and retribution voters. I have seen this first hand many times on SE. Some people apparently haven't experienced this at all, but that doesn't make it less real.

Some argue that public downvotes will lead to escalating retribution votes. That is unproven since these same people refuse to even try it. I believe exactly the opposite will happen. People feel free to cast retribution downvotes because they are anonymous. If all votes, or at least all downvotes, were public, retribution voters could be seen, and they would then look stupid or petty.

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Thanks for taking the time to post unpopular answer

ShowMeBillyJo‭ wrote about 4 years ago

I agree with you, Olin.