When you interact online and refuse to own your interactions, that’s trolling. That’s what I mean when I say that. If you aren’t willing to own up to your interactions (particularly negative ones), then you are being a troll. Small, large, medium sized doesn’t matter… a troll is a troll and contributes, however minorly, to the toxicity of a given community.

And as far as bans are concerned, that’s a moderation problem, not your role as an individual. I’ve never suggested votes should be completely untraceable, that’d be patently ridiculous and remove the ability to actually handle vote manipulation. Moderators and admins should obviously have that access, as I’ve asserted in this thread.

As an admin of an instance, that just adds more work that should be handled between users, not moderators/admins. Traditionally yes it’s been handled by moderators/admins, and they get overloaded and become jaded. They can be biased (for or against you), they can just not care, etc… if we can move that moderation job off of the moderators and onto the users where they belong, we foster the independence and autonomy, as well as the accountability, that every individual should have. That way, if something isn’t going your way you know where to look for the source of the problem, instead of blaming biased moderators etc…

I’m also not advocating my votes be anonymous, I’m fine with having them public on my page. That alone gives you the complete ability to make a judgement about me as a person, or whatever it is you want to do with that. What I’m suggesting is that a user who’s just been downvoted shouldn’t have a trivial way of linking it to the individual who downvoted them in order to harass them.

Why not? If the down voter is a bad actor, why not give the user the ability to know who it is and block them? If the down voter is a white hat and legitimately voting down a subject, why do they need to hide behind anonymity? Anonymous downvotes only serves the bad actors. If you are not a bad actor and you want to participate in a community, you should be held accountable for your actions. This is not a “if you have nothing to hide scenario…” Let me provide an example:

Poster A posts something controversial that is completely against the norms of society, lets say they post that “groping women on the train should be allowed”

Poster B downvotes them because it’s obviously a stupid idea and deserves a downvote. No problem, right? It’s downvoted because it should be downvoted and if poster A wants to go after poster B (and everyone else who downvoted), as you said, one down voter isn’t going to be a problem.

Now, what if Poster A posts “Every human deserves the same basic rights, including trans people!” and poster B decides to downvote Poster A. Should Poster A not be able to identify who downvoted them and avoid them in the future?

If voting is “such a minor part of the system” what does it matter if it’s public or not or if someone “goes after” someone who downvoted them? The worst they can do is … down vote them harder?

If, however, it’s not such a minor part and is an important part, then we need accountability for who’s voting.

If it’s a vote brigade situation or downvote bot, the user being downvoted as the right to know WHO is doing it and block them if they so choose. Taking it to the logical extreme, if a given individual blocks everyone who downvotes them, they will eventually end up in an echo chamber of their own making and isolate themselves, either through blocking people or people blocking them. So it becomes a non-issue on it’s own.

Frankly, the impression I’m getting is that you’re not actually paying much attention to the case I’ve made, and are instead just using my comments as a platform to have a completely different argument that you’re passionate about. That’s the ONLY way that you could have missed my point so entirely, and come to the conclusion that I could ONLY be a troll or a moron.

What case have you made for private voting? I haven’t seen you make a case, other than “Voting should not be accessible to the general public” but you haven’t explained or demonstrated a scenario where the benefits of that (which are… what?) outweigh the negatives (trolling, brigading, bots, morons, etc)