I recommend the asterism to instead be adopted as the symbol for astigmatism.

I’m really skeptical about that. Either that they would do it or that such “justified” downvoting would be a clear cut or fair decision. Most people don’t vote the right way. How many people downvote content they agree with or find funny but doesn’t add to the discussion? How many people upvote content they disagree with that does add to the discussion?

And am I really going to take up a mod’s time because someone got mad at me and downvoted—the most accessible and innocuous way to express displeasure with someone? How many more complaints about downvote bullying are mods going to have to field?

I don’t know. You could be right, but I’d want to see it successful in a small scale, if possible, before deploying it everywhere. Maybe the folks suggesting it should be up to the server admin are right. That would be another differentiator and people could go to communities on servers that have their preferred visibility policy. That would serve as an A/B test and let people vote with their feet.

I’ve been thinking about this for several hours since I first became aware of the debate.

I don’t care that much in theory if anyone sees my votes. They aren’t anything I’m particularly private about. I care about conversation way more than up/down votes.

However, some people get a little upset about being downvoted. I think it will result in retaliatory downvotes. You already see that when two folks are arguing. I don’t normally waste my time downvoting a post I’m writing a rebuttal to, but when they are downvoting me I tend to do it back. I think if everyone had easy access, they would hunt down their down voters posts and retaliate regardless of the quality of the comments.

Lastly, I wonder if this will give rise to a client that lets you use one account to post/comment and a different one to vote. And if it does, will that be better all around? Then no one will be able to associate votes with a user. But it seems unnecessarily wasteful to create a whole account that does nothing but vote. It seems like it would deny mods (and everyone) a useful tool for identifying bad actors.

Technically, anyone could get access to the voters identity if they try hard enough but 99% of the users won’t put in that much effort. And technically someone could already use different accounts for different activities, but without reason to create a client to support that it’s too much of a pain to be worth the effort.

So I really think I’m on team status quo here.

We can just subscribe to both though. I think we can even cross post. At least I’ve seen some things that look like cross posts. Frankly, I don’t see any difference.

My community is wherever I happen to be. Obviously I don’t know what you mod, but yesterday I probably wasn’t part of your community. Today it seems I am. Tomorrow is feeling pretty far away to know for certain. I can say I feel zero attachment to Reddit the URL or my account, which I recycle every few years anyway for privacy.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve had a lot of good conversations there, but I couldn’t name a single /u I’ve ever interacted with. The anonymous interactions are the point for me. Lemmy doesn’t have to be Reddit, it just has to be big enough that it gives me enough to think about and talk about in my downtime. I won’t miss Reddit at all.

PS membership was a requirement that hit me out of the blue since I’ve played D3 on PS for years with no issue. There is isn’t really much your need to organize. There is an auto sort so the only management you might need to do is the stash which is a slight pain on a controller, but not that bad.