I woke up today, to a public comment in a Lemmy community asking a series of tagged accounts why they had downvoted certain posts
I thought that reactions to posts and comments are anonymous and now I don’t really know what to feel about Lemmy any more.
In this case I had downvoted a poster because of its design, but was confronted publicly for being racist because the person assumed that I downvoted the message on the poster
EDIT: changed the title from “How” to “Why” because it broke rule nr 5 about it being a support question
Can’t see who downvoted, though. I’ve actually considered switching instances over this since that’s the most important thing to “be serious” with, it’d be nice if people were more judicious with their downvotes and having them be an obvious public thing might make people think twice about that. But the whole upvote/downvote thing in general just seems like a broken concept to me a this point and I don’t care all that much about it.
I am on an instance without downvotes and I really don’t miss it. I think it took me about the week for the muscle memory of downloading stupid comments to fade.
If something is truly outrageous, I take it as a sign to just block the author. And if something is against the rules, I’ll report it.
I think downvotes are hidden for every Mbin instance. I don’t know how it is with other software.