I read on reddit that on Lemmy you can see users’ upvote/downvote history. I therefore expected to be able to see upvote/downvote breakdown by user for my own comments. But couldn’t find this. Does this feature exist or is that a myth?
It actually already is a feature. Kbin puts it upfront, and I think lemmy also has a way to access it.
I think it remains to be seen whether or not it’s a good idea.
I’ve seen some people say they like the idea because it make people think twice about downvoting - it cuts back on the instinctive “I don’t like this so I am gonna downvote.”
But, as you said, do we really want people coming after you because you downvoted them? There are crazy ass people out there, and if you ever get doxxed it could be a problem.
Maybe that last point is hyperbole, but crazy people are gonna do crazy things.
“karma” (as reddit calls scoring) never was more true to its name. :)
I haven’t looked at Lemmy’s implementation of upvotes/downvotes, but they should be ActivityPub activities, so it means they should appear by making a request to the user’s actor.
EDIT: I’ve just checked random users outbox (that’s the ActivityPub name for the list of activities), included mine, they are actually just empty. So that probably means that Lemmy is only publishing the upvotes/downvotes when pushing activities to federated servers, which would make those activities way more private, although not completely : someone could setup their own instance to learn about them, and it’s best to be assume that at some point, someone will start such instance and publish an app revealing all votes for everybody (plus, as others mentioned, Kbin is already doing it).
