De-anonymize downvotes and treat them the same way upvotes are treated (which are already public)

[zer0fuku]

Requirements

• Is this a feature request? For questions or discussions use https://lemmy.ml/c/lemmy_support
• Did you check to see if this issue already exists?
• Is this only a feature request? Do not put multiple feature requests in one issue.
• Is this a backend issue? Use the lemmy-ui repo for UI / frontend issues.

Is your proposal related to a problem?

Right now, even though the UI doesn't show it, Lemmy clearly tells admins who upvoted any given comment or post. The same however is not true with downvotes, only downvotes from the admin's instance can be seen. Those from other instances are anonymized.

This of course leads to abuse. I have witnessed cases of people creating dozens of accounts on different instances to exploit this weakness and massively downvote comments they don't disagree with and sometimes even "harass" people by downvoting every comment made by a given person (they'd sometimes get caught when they then upvote their own comments with the same alts, as upvotes are clearly identified by Lemmy unlike downvotes).

This behavior of "your comment made me angry so I'm going to follow you everywhere and downvote you with my alts for the next few months" isn't new, that was imported from Reddit. But Reddit had automated ways to deal with vote manipulation.

In contrast, on Lemmy it's the total wild west when it comes to downvote manipulation. Bad actors will simply create a dozen fake accounts distributed over many instances to avoid being detected by any admin, as each admin will at most see only one of those in the downvotes, unless admins all collaborate to identify those downvotes. In essence, the Lemmy backend right now is enabling this abuse and contributing to more toxicity.

Describe the solution you'd like.

I don't know what the reasons were for this, but downvotes should not be handled differently from upvotes. The identity of the downvoters needs to properly federate just like what is already done with upvoting. That way it will be easy to spot abusers and report them to the instance admins.

Describe alternatives you've considered.

N/A

Additional context

No response

[Nutomic]

This is not true, downvotes are federated exactly in the same way as upvotes. Lemmy also doesnt "clearly tell admins who upvoted any comment or post". Its only that votes (up and down) can be seen in the database. I wonder how you came to these conclusions.