Names blurred to protect the innocent / crazy. Not trying to call anyone out, just thought the response was hilarious and highly disproportionate. Like, they distinguished that comment (green border/background).
For reference, the comment I presume that was downvoted that apparently triggered that response was to the tune of “BoTH SiDEz!!!” with some hyper generalizing / stereotyping on the side.
What do you mean votes aren’t public? I see the up vote / down vote on this comment in fact.
Everyone can see the count of both upvotes and downvotes. But instance owners can also see the usernames of who upvoted and who downvoted a given post/comment. (Probably also the list of all posts/comments a given user has upvoted/downvoted, I think?) And not just users on the same instance. Users from other instances too.
I think I’ve heard that the usernames of users who upvoted/downvoted things are also public info on Kbin. (Not just to instance owners, but also to regular users.)
On stock Kbin, you could see the usernames of whoever downvoted you. But it also only synced downvotes from within its own instance, so you wouldn’t see downvotes on your posts if the were from outside instances. I think that may be a server-side setting that Ernest had enabled on Kbin.social, so I think Kbin can be configured for either option.
I believe that technically, the list of users who downvote is public on all instances, but it requires having some means of pulling that data out of the API, as it’s usually not displayed in the default web UI.
I’ve looked around a bit at the API and haven’t found it, but I didn’t look too exhaustively. I might look again when I get a second.
Up/Downvotes usernames are publicly visible via the API to everyone. Kbin shows users this, lemmy does not.
Only upvotes
Ah. Ok. I might see if I can track down specifically which endpoint that is at some point.