There was an era of reddit where some nerds used addons to tag users for their own personal notes. Nothing wrong with making your own tags for people, imo.

But I do remember there were extensions for “mass tagging”. You could install browser extensions to label people based on their post history. Someone would run a script, aggregate data, put little tags on people based on how they post. Like, maybe you would install a tagger to label people who don’t agree with you politically, based on someone’s aggregated data.

I never personally liked the mass tagging stuff. It felt toxic to put people you don’t know in boxes. But, I never felt like it should be prevented. At the end of the day if you post something publicly, you shouldn’t be surprised when people respond to that.

But, some people here might not realize how public their vote history is. Not sure anyone wants weird graphs about how they vote. I upvote a lot of stuff, I’m sure a lot of people upvote stuff they don’t totally agree with. Maybe I’m imagining a problem where there isn’t one. I’ve just seen how weird people get when it’s easy to put people in boxes.

In order to read gmails, you have to work at google.

In order to read the upvotes on this post, all you have to do is spin up your own lemmy instance. Anyone with technical knowledge can do it. The problem is a bit different. I could do it, if I was motivated.

If lemmy gets popular enough, there will be 3rd party sites with search bars and nice UIs and graphs to help you see how someone votes.

Not sure what the solution is. Maybe if we can’t make votes private, they should be fully public.