

Ask HN: Why do Hacker News, Reddit, not show the users that voted? - suliamansaleh

i was wondering why we are not allowed to see the people are voting on posts, is this like a technical issue, or a political one(conflict), i dont get it thanks
======
pg
It's a social choice. It wouldn't be difficult technically. Historically the
origin of the custom may be slashdot.

~~~
malandrew
Complementing pg's answer here about "social choice".

It places the focus squarely on the news content and not on the users
involved. There's no following and there's no cronyism this way.

In many services, such as twitter and quora, I've noticed that there is some
degree of reciprocity that occurs even if it is neither expressed or implied
that you should reciprocate. In fact, in most cases there is nothing written
or unwritten culturally that says you should reciprocate, yet people do
anyways.

By eliminating this you eliminate this falsely perceived social expectation of
reciprocity, thus placing 100% of voting motivation on content. This is the
right approach if you want stories and comments to make it to the front page
based on quality of content alone.

------
brudgers
Anonymous voting reduces _quid pro quo_ , vendettas and other sorts of
unproductive behaviour.

~~~
suliamansaleh
"quid pro quo" i didnt know what it means, but it sounded pretty kool, just
checked it on wiki, it sounds so british, im a londoner myself, fantasttic use
of words @brudgers

~~~
mzl
You could also use google translate from latin, although this particular
phrase is somewhat special :)

------
ashitvora
May be they want to keep things simple.

You anyways don't know other users unlike facebook where most of the people
liking and commenting on your status are your fiends.

More features they have, more complex it is for users and developers have to
maintain it.

------
makecheck
Occasionally, a single comment can get over 100 points. The site may not want
to keep track of that many links to a single post. (Not that I know why it
works the way it does, but this seems like a good technical reason for it.)

~~~
mzl
It still needs to keep track of it for purposes of stopping double voting.

------
bmm6o
It would seem like the default option to me. Why would it show you who voted
up and down? What would you do with that information?

