So, I was recently banned from a community for being a “serial downvoter”. If the votes I’ve cast there were only downvotes, that surprises me, but I’m looking to gather more information about how, historically, I’ve voted in that community before I seek an appeal with the mods.
Being banned from that community, I can’t see my my votes in that community just by sorting by “new” and scrolling through all posts in the community looking for blue (upvotes) here and orange (downvotes) there to get a rough idea of how much I’ve upvoted and how much I’ve downvoted specifically in that community. (And even that sounds like a pain.)
I tried lemvotes.org. It will give me every post and comment I’ve ever upvoted or downvoted, which is great, I guess, but it’s not really easy to see which votes were for what communities. In fact, it’s not really easy to see what votes are for what instances. Each vote has an associated link on lemvotes.org to the post (or comment) I voted on, but domain name of the link doesn’t necessarily go to the instance that hosts the post. As in (for instance) a post I downvoted that shows up on lemvotes.org with a link to a piefed.zip may take me to a post that was originally posted to a programming.dev-instance community. So the domain of the link doesn’t narrow it down any. As far as I can tell, the only option lemvotes.org affords me is to look exhaustively at all of my votes, click the link for each of them, take note of what instance/community the vote was cast on, and keep a tally of upvotes/downvotes only for the community I’m particularly concerned with, which would be super time consuming. And I haven’t found any better options.
But I haven’t really found any better options, and I’m hoping you folks might have an idea or two. I guess worst case, I can DM the mod without getting this information, but I’d really rather go into that conversation a little more informed. (And, I suppose, if I find out that the only votes I’ve cast in that community are downvotes, I might decide not to even pursue an unban. But I’ll see what I can find out, at least.)
Making it possible to vote up and/or down while preventing double-voting for the same account in a distributed application like Fediverse sort of applications seems challenging at best unless every instance knows exactly who voted which way on what. What I wish is that Lemmy would make it a proper feature that it was public information who voted on what.
I dunno. Maybe it would be possible to implement some zero-knowledge proof sort of thing that would keep people from double-voting (purposefully or accidentally) without anybody but the voter knowing who voted for what. But absent that, I’d rather that seeing that information wasn’t limited to an elite group of users composed of just mods/admins. I’d also rather that I didn’t have to go to a separate site to see information about upvotes and downvotes.
I suppose the argument could be made that we could get away with not having votes. Just make how high it shows up high on the “hot” sort by how many comments it has. Though I do feel like there are “good” posts that I’d want to see with few/no comments.
Or don’t manipulate the popularity of a thing and just show everything by date. If a thing can be manipulated, it shouldn’t be a thing.