having all votes public may also be an improvement.
The purpose of implementing voting, as opposed to (for example) soliciting critical/praising comments, is to get more information about people’s attitude towards individual comments, by lifting reasons not to signal (and thus lock the community focus better, protecting it from watering down). Commenting would be less frequent because (1) it’s more difficult to comment; (2) if you have little to say, or what you’d say has already been said, you don’t want to create more noise.
Requiring that votes are made public will discourage some of the voters from signaling their attitude, or otherwise distort the signal for image purposes. I’m not even sure whether voluntary public voting is a good idea, because of the image-driven distortion effect, but since it’s presumably no worse than with commenting, it might not be that bad.
The purpose of implementing voting, as opposed to (for example) soliciting critical/praising comments, is to get more information about people’s attitude towards individual comments, by lifting reasons not to signal (and thus lock the community focus better, protecting it from watering down). Commenting would be less frequent because (1) it’s more difficult to comment; (2) if you have little to say, or what you’d say has already been said, you don’t want to create more noise.
Requiring that votes are made public will discourage some of the voters from signaling their attitude, or otherwise distort the signal for image purposes. I’m not even sure whether voluntary public voting is a good idea, because of the image-driven distortion effect, but since it’s presumably no worse than with commenting, it might not be that bad.