Piefed has the answer:

Why care? There is no karma system. Just move on

If you're moderating a small community, downvotes can bury posts and hurt its growth.

Votes are public as far as the API is concerned and there are tools to show you who voted in what way.

I'm aware of lemvotes.org. However, I think this should be part of the default interface, for everyone.

In Lemmy currently this feature is exclusive to comms you moderate:

Sadly I don't expect anything similar for PieFed. I really like plenty of its features, but when it comes to vote visibility it's going the opposite direction - making them unavailable by the API instead.

making them unavailable by the API instead.

Votes are available via the API. There is a setting to limit it to your local instance. By default, they federate.

That's a rather recent change, isn't it? From what I remember the votes were cast by alternate profiles, so even if you tried to grab them from the API you wouldn't know who voted on what.

It's been around for a while, I don't remember the dates

Basically, this is what it looks like

Ah, OK. Thanks for the correction + further info!

Valve isn't perfect but they've gotten a lot of community good will by not being shitty and vindictive. Nintendo has been just really shitty to their own fans for a long time, with unnecessary litigation and criminal prosecution.

I do agree that tribalism is pretty extreme within the fediverse, but I also don't think that's anything new for any small internet community.

I think there's an argument to be made though, that if you're a person who browses the "all" feed rather than subscriptions or individual communities, that there's a point where you should block a particular community you don't want to see rather than continuously downvoting it. When the content isn't harmful but you merely dislike it, it seems reasonable to expect the user to curate their experience at least a little.

There is also an argument that expecting everyone to agree with and follow the unwritten rules of 'voting correctly' is just a vocal minority trying to impose their will on all users.

Generally I limit to subs but browse All occasionally to find new communities. Part of this process is upvoting and down voting stuff and seeing which communities has more stuff I want and less stuff I thought was worth downvoting. I then sub or block after that point.

That is how I notice spammed slop as part of blocking a community. No, I won't be going back to remove down votes before blocking just because the community is about spamming slop and the posts fit the sub. Harm isn't a down voting requirement.

I'm still so curious about how you decided that this simple thought:

But the downside is that people then upvote or downvote based on their preferences, not the community’s.

somehow secretly also means “don’t ever downvote” ?

I can't explain something you made up.

My opinion is that people should vote however they want becsuse it does not hurt the fediverse, as long as each person votes once. That includes downvoting.

I didn't make this up, you wrote:

I pointed out that you don’t practice what you preach.

And I'm **still **baffled as to how you've come to that conclusion. The only thing you've shared is that ~20% of my votes are downvotes? Which somehow you've decided goes against this simple thought:

But the downside is that people then upvote or downvote based on their preferences, not the community’s.

So, what on Earth are you talking about?

Edit: Or, you could do the normal adult thing and just say "oh, my bad, I got confused as to whom I was responding" or "my mistake, I misread what you wrote and kind of dug in there" etc. Honestly, admitting you've made a mistake isn't a sign of weakness or stupidity, it's a sign of being a functional adult. (A valuable lesson to learn well.)