Even dimensional analysis works best with metric because sometimes you need to convert units and almost all conversion in metric are base 10, so something like 1kg/km is 1000g/1000m is 1 gram per meter. But in imperial 1 pound/mile is 16 ounces / 5280 feet is who the fuck knows how many ounces per feet.
We could split the difference and users could get auto-notified if their vote was viewed and by whom. That way it’s a two-way street. The mod/admin can see your votes, the users know that their vote was accessed by that mod.
It would be pointless to do. Anyone can view your votes without notifying you. Just set up your own instance, download the data (that you need to do anyway because of how activitypub works) and then just open up the database with a different software to access the data. No notification can be sent because the application doesn’t know the data was accessed.
Second choice would be that all users are anonymized by a hash so that bad vote actors can be removed via their hash being associated with malicious or other bad acting, but to discover who individuals are the admin would have to do the legwork of follonf multiple posts/ comments to associate the hash.
This opens a door to vote manipulation. If you can’t verify users someone can send random hashes.
Otherwise hide the votes if trust of anonymity is paramount.
The votes still exist in the activitypub. They’re already publicly available, the question is how accessible they should be because right now if you want to track downvotes you need to put in some effort. Upvotes you can already easily check from any mbin instance
You could make the saame argument against commenting, say the wrong thing and you get harassed. But what do you do with someone harassing you? You block them. What do you do when someone is harassing you by downvoting you? You most likely suck it up because you don’t know who is downvoting you.
I would argue it’s more a tool against harassment than a tool for harassment, especially since anyone determined enough can already access that information.
I don’t want votes to be public
You don’t even need an account to see upvotes. Just look it up on an mbin instance
Your votes already aren’t private, they’re simply not easily accessible (by the average user). I won’t get into the technical details but the short version is that every instance owner who is federated with your instance already knows how you’ve voted. Someone could make a website right now that collects votes and shows how someone has voted or who upvoted/downvoted a post or comment. It’s already public information.
We used to believe it’s true, but it has come under question. In fact just recently there was a paper that concluded language is more a tool for communication than thought.
There are language that have lived for centuries without any lexical rules. Any value lost is only in the the eyes of the preceptivists. Language can and will easily live on with all the internal inconsistencies. In fact language rules are usually built around those inconsistencies because the language people speak is more important than whatever rules purists come up with.
Yes and no but mostly no. Prescriptivists are are great when you need to build a general structure of a language, but language can and will evolve without any intelligent design by the people using it.
The primary purpose of language is to communicate ideas and most of the times the linguistic rules are not necessary to convey an idea.
Out for curiosity, why do you need 128gb of ram?