As another user pointed out, what about an LGBT person wanting to upvote something but not feeling safe if someone knows their username? Or a woman living in a place with abortion bounties wanting to upvote something about how to get help, but being afraid to?

Or someone with an abusive spouse who might read between the lines (correctly or incorrectly) of what you upvote/downvote and get angry about it?

There are a lot of highly significant real world ramifications to having your vote history publicly accessible. Losing your job and life or death consequences far outweigh the online voting system considerations.

The possible problems caused by this FAR outweigh the possible benefits. People are just not thinking this through enough to see how badly it can go.

1. Greater attention to user anonymity. For example, right now, you can look at any thread/comment and see who upvoted it and who downvoted it. In addition to causing arguments and drama, it also can be used to build a profile of what a user likes or dislikes - which can have significant ramifications for many people. Users need to be able to trust in certain aspects of anonymity and have control over what information they allow to be public. That also includes public access to know who follows a particular user as well.

2. The ability to save threads and comments.

3. The ability to expand/collapse comment trees.

4. Better moderation tools, including the ability to be notified when new threads are created in a magazine you moderate.

5. The titles to threads need to directly link to the linked URL instead of opening the kbin comments page. You shouldn’t need to go through twice the effort to get to the linked URL. It also adds twice the load for the kbin servers.

If true, that aspect alone is going to lose a lot of users. It becomes too much trouble to hide information you don’t want accidentally revealed.

It would be better to find a solution that grants actual anonymity. Otherwise, people will stop engaging for fear that it might someday be used against them.

I understand where you’re coming from. However, I think that ultimately, it will cause more problems than it will solve.

Either people who have been downvoted will start calling out those who downvoted them or they will simply create a grudge list and start downvoting everyone who downvoted them.

While there might be some positive aspects, I think they will be overshadowed by the negative.

Thank you for pointing that out.

I think it’s a bad idea to make that information public, as it is almost certainly going to be the cause of arguments, bitterness, drama, and tit-for-tat downvote wars.