Well the first part is a cogent argument good job! I’ll ignore the ramblings below it.

What you’re describing isn’t working, that’s the argument for the public vs private. To dissuade the gaming of totals that I refernced 6 comments ago now, you’ll have to scroll past your shitposting to get there. I’ll wait.

If you’re fighting what are essentially automated bots that upvote or downvote as much as they like, and then having to verify accounts to ptevent the bots, then distribute tools to auto mods, then restructure again, it’s all a game of cat and mouse. You need community engagement not content moderation. Community tools and culture are how you fight disinformation. Let people communicate their points. Give better sorting in the comments and use many different algos to sort responses. Not just upvote downvote. Arithmetic is very easily gamed for the motivated and loud minority voice. It’s literally the reason many people left Tumblr, Dig, Reddit and will leave Lemmy. A binary choice doesn’t promote discussion it drives “engagement”.

You haven’t even touched on my argument of dopamine buttons. I think it might be your fixation on cleaning products and projection. If you’re going to use the labor of your end users to self moderate then you should hide all upvote/downvote tallies. Also fully anonymise counts. Voting systems are anonymous for many different reasons one is to prevent what has commonly been referred to as influencer clout. Another is to prevent direct targeting of users.