not. at all. i consider anything i put here akin to standing on my nearest street corner during rush hour, shouting into the darkness

confused how anyone could think anything otherwise.

They're not private at all, I've never been under the illusion that they were.

I like it, have some guts, stand on business. If people want to downvote they should be willing to attach their name to it, internet points are fake anyway.

Votes are not private and never will be.

There have been some discussions about whether Threadiverse software should only federate out the number of votes and perhaps some anonymised voter IDs, rather than information that identifies individual users. This would prevent vote snooping via sites like Lemvotes. However, even if something like that were implemented, instance admins would still be able to snoop on their own users if they so wished. So imo, it's better to just accept that votes are public information.

Personally I don't see the issue with it. My principle when it comes to voting is upvoting stuff I want others to see and only downvote things I don't think anyone would want to see (like spam). So if for some odd reason someone is interested enough to check my voting history, I don't care. What's the worst that could happen? Someone on the internet disagrees with my votes? Oh no! How will I ever survive?!

As a side note, Lemmy's developers seem to have a strong opinion that voter information shouldn't be displayed publicly. For example, here's an issue they opened in the Mbin repo. While I disagree with their stance on vote visibility, Nutomic has a valid point there: Lemmy doesn't mark voting activity as public when federating it out, so there's an argument to be made that other software should not display individual votes coming from Lemmy.

Completely public

Lemvotes shows votes. So, it’s not private.

Not at all, and I believe that’s the point.

I don't expect much privacy on a shared public space like the fediverse. If I wanted privacy, I'd spin up a new profile every day/week, and use an external bookmark manager to save stuff

Data has to federate, so nothing is going to really be private like you mention. I think it's unreasonable to expect anything otherwise. I don't see a point to hiding votes because of this. If someone starts stalking or harassing their voters for some reason, have a reporting system and handle that.

I wish my votes were even more public. If I've taken the time to downvote your bullshit/nonsense, I want you to know it was me. Same with upvotes.

I assume there’s no privacy whatsoever, and I wouldn’t believe anyone who told me otherwise.

About 10 years ago I decided that the only way I could proceed forward in life is to automatically assume I'm being watched and listened to always. This has nothing to do with paranoia and everything to do with the nature of tech ownership and capitalism.

On Lemmy? As others have said, they're automatically federated and so anyone can see them.

On Piefed though? I have a user setting where I can choose whether my votes federate and I can override that default on a given post if I choose with a hot key. That's how it should be. IMHO, more of y'all should use Piefed.

I don't expect my votes to be private, but I will vote as if they were. People reading too much into why someone might have voted a certain way and trying to shame them for it is embarrassing, I'm not going to constrain myself to reasons for voting that are immediately legible to anyone via only one bit of information just for their sake. If I want to downvote something with, for instance, a political message I agree with but the person phrased it in a way that goes against my pet peeves, I'm gonna do that, and I think the ideal would be for these numbers not to be taken very personally or seriously.

So basically I'd say it's bad taste to put it in a UI, but only so far as it encourages people to be weird about it, and ultimately that's on them.

zero, it's on the internet, it:s not "private"

Its like sitting near a window basically, people on the sidewalk are gonna have trouble seeing you with just their eyes (i mean like most sidewalks are quite far away to the window because of front yards) but anyone could get a camera with zoom lens and see your face.

I have no expectations of privacy on any social media, including this one. I'm here to yell my very important opinions at anyone who'll listen.

Literally none I basically assumed that anything I do on the internet can be read by anyone at any time. I'm still a fucking freak because they'll have to kill me to stop me from being freaky. If I die unexpectedly the government did it. Never forget that.

Me personally I would say that private votes are better if possible. But you should be able to filter when you're logged in what you upvoted and downvoted. That's how I would like it ideally.

zero private.

I realize they aren't private and don't care.

I vote on such a small minority of things that those few things I do vote on, I have no problem with people knowing it was me.

Well they aren’t private and it doesn’t matter

From the technical side anyone can spin up their own Lemmy instance and view all votes,

Or just view them on lemvotes.org.

Personally, I don’t care too much about my votes being public. I vote very thoughtfully and try to upvote posts and comments that add to the community and I downvote misinformation.

But, I think people should be able to choose. I do think there are many valid reason for them to be private.

I don't worry about that. I have no expectation that up/downvotes be not tied to my username.

On a privacy scale of 1 to 100: 2.

Mods can see it, all someone has to do is spin up a private instance and they can see it too, plus there's Lemvotes. It's kinda neat like I can see that I upvoted 8,052 posts and downvoted 17 from that account, or from this account I upvoted 15,327 comments and downvoted 86.

Some instances though - like PieFed.social - have defederated from Lemvotes, so anyone's vote offered to a community on that instance will not be counted by Lemvotes. But ofc that's merely one of many tools for me to find the data, whereas if someone spins up their own instance then they - or a community mod - can still see it by other means.

The reason I went into all this detail is bc if is relevant to your purpose that not everyone on the Threadiverse shares the same view about vote privacy. Some instances will defederate from yours in an attempt to retain control over the visibility of votes from their own. So perhaps you can devise some mechanism to allow admins the choice to opt-out, without having to defederate from your entire instance wholesale?

Stand by your vote.

Zero. Use this site with a VPN and assume any data you put on here is being harvested.

Nothing I do on the Fediverse is private lmao.

They are not, it's akin to shouting in the rain. Most people will be inside not getting wet, but there people that either like the rain, or get paid to stand in it

The lemmy vote viewer is quite limited but I suspect that there are a few servers that have spun their own DB queries and charting:

[edit spelling]

No idea. I don't like public voting and only do it on rare occasions. I was doing it a lot to get rid of things from my feed but rimu put in a read button so now Im back to almost never doing it.

I vote by using a whiteboard marker on my monitor, that way no one can steal my lucky charms.

Zero. Upvotes are a show of appreciation and I don't see why anyone would want that to be private. When it comes to downvotes, if you wouldn't want someone to know you downvoted something, you can't stand by that decision and so shouldn't have downvoted in the first place. Public reactions (alongside the self moderation features) keeps the fediverse honest and prevents the hostile type of downvote spamming you see on other platforms like reddit.

There are private things on the internet?

In my opinion this isn’t that big of a problem since it’s fairly hard to look at and discern

You are like one LLM prompt away from a website that makes it fairly easy to look at and discern so that’s not really a valid argument

I thought there was a user search that showed you what they upvoted or downvoted on. To me that could be abused by a party like the US border agents, or ads to check what type of things you've marked as a yay or nay

Fully public

☑️ No

✅ Yes

Not very.

Which is fine with me

Better question? Do votes ultimately matter? Some instances show who voted, some don’t, some don’t even count downvotes. So in the end, who cares?

Not at all.

Was already aware for a while of reactions being public for anyone with enough expertise to see.

I didn’t know that administrators or moderators could see the votes. So they can’t be considered completely private.

do it mang.

I downvote Nazi shit and upvote funny shit. I got nothing to hide.

imho:

1. public, just not shown in ui
2. would bother me if shown near the comment/post, since that would change the meaning of the vote: on lemmy only the total is shown there, sometime I do things like upvoting a comment I don't fully agree with because that "aggregate" is too low in my opinion (or the opposite of that), which make sense only if just the total is shown.