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

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

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

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It's a social choice. It wouldn't be difficult technically. Historically the origin of the custom may be slashdot.

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.

Anonymous voting reduces quid pro quo, vendettas and other sorts of unproductive behaviour.

"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

If only I could program in Latin.

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

Quora shows who voted up an answer among the people you follow (presumably you value their opinion). Makes a lot of sense in that context.

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.

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.)

Sites like reddit can garner thousands of votes on a certain comment. Keeping track of these would further decrease reddit's already slow response time.

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

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?

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