Problem is, if it’s visible to mods, it’s effectively public.
This also presumes mods are, by default, inherently non-biased, held to a standard, and never have vendettas of their own.
Of all the many things reddit did poorly, choosing not to let mods see votes was an excellent decision.
Skavau@piefed.social 1 week ago
Public voting, or at least semi public-voting helps cultivate a high-trust culture on-site in my opinion. And being able to remove repeat offending downvoters who do it nonetheless is very useful.
I managed to discover the serial downvoters on my old lemm.ee comm and when I banned them (about 4 of them?) it had a huge impact. They didn't all downvote /everything/ but they downvoted a lot of things, and no contribution. And if they got in early, they could sink new threads. As that kind of behaviour now is more-or-less confined to non-interacting support/troll accounts, it's much rarer of a problem. Unlike Reddit when a lot of threads can quickly get downvote buried instantly for seemingly no reason.