Unless we talking polls, normally they should be public. It encourages accountability, discourages the place becoming a shit hole like the YouTube comments section, and moreover is just plain more friendly to federated instances than to have these flood of oddly named accounts.

Conversely, making votes private would encourage rather than discourage voting manipulation tactics, by obfuscating normal voting patterns, within which manipulation could be hidden among.

Please also keep in mind that nothing on the internet is truly private. iirc, someone can always gather your identity by e.g. sending out an image on a self-hosted server and then watch the IP addresses of the recipients that download it, or YouTube will show demographics (gender, approximate age range, etc.) of people who click to watch a video there, which if few enough people click within a given timeframe can be used to help identify people.

I don’t mind that someone knows that “OpenStars has up/downvoted this content” - it is part of living in a society where one’s contributions are observed in the context of the larger world. I normally even take the time to respond if I ever downvote, unless I’m merely adding mine to a pile of existing ones. And given this context, I don’t really see the appeal of trying to obfuscate that? Besides, if I truly wanted to do so then I could always create an alt (or hundred) and accomplish an anonymous downvote, without the need for it built into the system? I don’t really see the use case for private voting I suppose.

I think we don’t need to go very far. We could take inspiration from other Fediverse software. At some point we want to be able to properly connect to Mastodon (like MBin) anyway, and other software where you’d follow people, Pixelfed… So why not use the concept of “Boosts” the right way? Those are meant to funnel content into your follower’s timeline (aka visibility). No misunderstanding like here on Lemmy where people sometimes forget whether an upvote means “I agree” or “I want to recommend this to other people”. Also does away with the unloved downvotes.

And then there are Misskey etc which have Emoji Reactions. That’s already using ActivityPub. And it adds nuance to the reactions. Maybe that could even be extended into the “Slashdot” style, if we enhance the emojis a bit. And we don’t even need to invent anything new.

As is, I’m not in love with Lemmy’s voting system. It’s a simplistic popularity contest. Very much social media with all the issues that come with social media. People upvote memes and popular stuff. In the comments, it’s regularly simpler “truths” which get upvoted, not so much the nuanced take which takes some time to read and understand. Also urban myths and so on… Most of the times it’s okay-ish. But I don’t get much use out of it. I’m not interested in memes and mainstream. And the interesting (to me) stuff doesn’t have a lot of upvotes. So I sort by “new” and make use of subscriptions and feeds. The votes don’t mean a lot to me, I could live without them and I’d prefer an old-school Linux forum with it’s atmosphere and some emoji reactions and a trophy or award here and there for excellent content.

I don’t use private voting. I think the entire concept is a bit impossible to implement on a distributed network. It’s either moderation, or private votes. I’d be all for keeping them private, if that came without issues. But it doesn’t. And I’m not sure what would be a good compromise here. I don’t think there is one.

Edit: On the flipside I also need something to show there is some activity and engagement with the posts and comments. It always feels like a ghost town unless there are some. Especially with posts that are just links to news articles. Or my own comments and I want to know if I waste my time here, or whether someone reads them. And I need downvotes for my own mental well-being. I use them sparingly, but I couldn’t live without.

So summarized: I’m not satisfied with the current voting system. I think we should try some major changes.

Public, ideally with a more refined system similar to Slashdot.

Public because votes should be a shorter way to express a comment. Comments are public.

I’m not sure it’s really possible to make votes private (at least not without sacrificing some functionality we have now.) Right now, instance admins can see vote information while non-admjns can’t, which I do think is a bad thing. It does create a privileged class with additional information that ordinary users don’t get. If there was a way to make votes private, I’d probably be ok with that, but again I’m not sure that’s possible. (Instances have to be able to prevent double-/triple-/etc voting on a single post/comment by a single user. Maybe there’s some cryptographic blind-signature wizardry that could be used to accomplish that while denying instance runners access to the information. I want to say I might have even come up with such an approach in a previous post and I might look back through my history for it, but it might also involve some concessions functionality-wise.) If that information has to be open to some, though, I think it should be open to all.

Aside from that, I like the upvote/downvote system as it is. It’s simple works nicely. I honestly use “new”/“all” sort (excluding the communities I’ve blocked) nearly exclusively, so I don’t have all that much invested in the “hot” sorting option that is the default probably on most Lemmy instances. But I like not having an algorithm (even one as good and fair as Lemmy’s) curating my content for me.

Oh! On the sorting front, though, I’d love to have a “boost” option for specific communities. Like “hey Lemmy, no matter what sort I use, make sure any post that was made to !underwater_beekeeping@lemmy.beans in the last 48 hours always appears right at the top of my feed.” Like, new/all (excluding blocks) is great, but there are communities I don’t want to miss even a single post in ever and it’d be awesome to have that.

Actually, now that I think of it, I could just only subscribe to those “don’t want to miss a single post” communities and check new/subscribed before I start doomscrolling new/all.

I think vote should be private by default, public by choice. Because I thought my votes were private to users at first.

I’m somewhat satisfied with the current system, it’s a bit linear but still efficient.

I like how steam reviews added a [funny], [yes], [no] votes.

I imagine an optional vote feature after an upvote. So the user could say why they liked it by using [useful], [funny] or [relatable]. I know it won’t match every posts or comments. Then use those three categories to optionally filter posts/comments (e.g. filter by most useful comments).