FuzzyRedPanda

No worries! :)

Yeah. I guess we shouldn’t expect that to change any time soon?

If that’s the case, maybe public votes is the best way to go.

You should not be ashamed of your vote history.

I agree, people shouldn’t be ashamed of their vote history unless they are trying to harass a person or community with a pattern of downvotes.

I still don’t want to be harassed for my voting though, nor will I be pressured into defending my votes if a user brings it up.

Who determines the quality of one’s posts though?

The users? Users are reactionary and often vote based on how a post influenced their feelings. It probably works on Stack Exchange because the scope of the forum is solving technical problems.

Downvotes can be useful in certain contexts, like when you visit a thread and are looking for factual information, such as the answer to a tech question. I don’t want to accidentally follow someone’s bad advice because the bad advice didn’t have any downvotes nor any responses as to why it was wrong.

It’s not perfect, but voting is a quick, often effective method of fact checking.

It would encourage harassment the same way comment history does: someone goes looking for it, sees it, and attacks the person over it.

Aren’t we all supposed to be Linux nerds in here?

No! :) The most Linux I use is a Steam Deck.

I feel votes should be visible to admins but otherwise anonymized and private, or else I fear vote-harassment could become a forever-problem on Lemmy. As a woman who has been harassed on Twitter and Reddit in the past, I strongly urge the Lemmy community to embrace privacy on this issue. If there’s any way to make votes more private between users, we should do it.

If we don’t and users get harassed, they might leave. Lemmy needs more women. And you all are great but Lemmy also needs people who aren’t Linux nerds! Lemmy needs diversity.