They shouldn't be able to do that!
this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2025
456 points (88.9% liked)
Ask Lemmy
34471 readers
1859 users here now
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com.
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
6) No US Politics.
Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world or !askusa@discuss.online
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
What I'd really like is if comment downvotes were public.
Edit: Thanks to Optional, here are the users who downvoted this comment (also lists users who upvoted).
You just have to enable it in your client, presuming your instance supports it.
On Voyager it’s in Settings -> Appearance -> Other -> Display Votes -> Separate.
I think they might have meant the identity of the voter, not just the specific number, but this one’s a great feature as well
Gotcha. https://lemvotes.org/
What I mean is that I would like to see the usernames of everyone who downvoted.
Oh.
https://lemvotes.org/
This is seriously excellent. Now I can tell who downvoted my comments. I had even previously tried to look through the public lemmy API to see if I could find this information. Thank you!
Yeah, yw, it's very cool. Donate to the author!
They are on some instances.
People who only socialize online are often too cowardly to handle it, as they use downvotes sometimes as a way to disagree/show their disapproval without standing by it, and would be terrified if they had to explain why they did so. 🤷
95% of the time when downvoting content it's a question of...
Disagreeing/considering the content bad/thinking the user is behaving poorly.
Also, writing comments takes a lot more time, which (believe it or not) is a limited and valuable resource for most people on the internet.
That's okay, but it should be visible to everyone that you agreed or disagreed, for the sake of clarity, honesty and responsible communication. Ideally, votes wouldn't exist (and if you don't have anything to say in the forum or simply don't want to, well, you just don't and you lurk quietly), but if such low-level ways of engaging with the topic are allowed then we shouldn't be afraid to at least have that vote public, IMO.
No? We're already using pseudonyms, which is intentional and has a purpose.
It already is public, just not easily accessible. Why do you want to know all the votes? A voter is not an active part of the conversation. I'd equate it to the audience cheering or booing on a talk show.
For the ones actively participating you can read their comments and it'll be obvious what their stance is.
Absolutely disagree on that one. Votes are a fundamental part of this type of social media, and the low-pressure interaction of up/down votes encourages a large number of people to interact and rank content. This shifts focus from the loudest/most active people dominating the space to the most widely appreciated content dominating the space. This is explicitly one of the parts I like about it.
Also, more replies are not necessarily useful. Consider all the "This!" or "Same!" comments from Reddit. An up/down vote is much more information dense.
Honestly it sounds to me like you actually want a forum based on fundamentally different mechanics. Technically it wouldn't be that difficult to create a Lemmy clone that just scraps votes entirely from the UI, but you'd need a new way to rank content.
In an ideal scenario I'd actually prefer the votes be entirely anonymous, but that's just not feasible with the fediverse system.