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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • That’s what PieFed changes though. You can still track how someone votes, but you can’t tie it to a specific profile (without doing some extra analysis and even then you can’t be completely sure).

    Or, with my suggestion, you could track how that specific account votes, but it would be easy to obfuscate who exactly it is and (hopefully) impossible to track to the user’s other identities.






  • Looks like it’s kinda hard to spin up a piefed bot. Not impossible, but it’s a bitch without an API.

    What you would actually want to do if you want to bot is take one of the existing apps and modify it to make spamming easy.

    Either way, I want to be able to point to their behavior - without the extra step of having to de-anonymize their activity - and tell them to chill the fuck out or get the fuck out. Out means out. Totally and forever.

    I can see why you would want that, but my question is is that such a big deal compared to people being harassed for their voting? I don’t think user privacy should be violated - especially en masse / by default just because of some (in my opinion fairly minor) moderation concerns.

    And if they are a dick overall, then you will figure it out anyway, ban their “main” account and that will prevent them from voting, too (unless the instance is malicious, but then a malicious instance can do much more harm in general).








  • When you comment you make a conscious decision to put your opinion out there and sign it with your “name” (or alternatively you switch to a “burner” account and do it pseudonymously).

    But when you vote for stuff it’s often without much thinking, and it’s private on pretty much every other platform. Where it isn’t it’s usually blatantly obvious that that is the case.

    What difference does it make that votes can be viewed, other than for transparency during discussion?

    There are many reasons that have been stated time and time again; one is simply that people may wish to stay anonymous when supporting certain opinions.

    To me it feels like comments are what you can actually stand behind publicly, while votes also show what you think privately. And not everyone is willing to stand behind all of their opinions publicly, often for fear of backlash or harassment.




  • introduces no new spam/brigade vulns which don’t already exist from a rogue instance

    It does though. Now a rogue instance would have to have “believable” profiles for the accounts that vote, because an instance of just “lurkers” who seem to suspiciously vote is a pretty big signal of vote manipulation. If you only see a random identifier (or not even that, just a tally of votes) it’d be impossible to tell if it’s truly the instance’s users just passionate about something or actual vote manipulation.

    In other words it would at least make the problem way worse.



  • Votes could be publicly federated but tied to some uuid instead of the username. That way you still have the same anti spam ability (can see that a user upvoted these things from this instance at this time) but can’t tie it directly to comments or actual user accounts without some extra osint.

    The issue with that is with malicious instances that could engage with vote manipulation by just generating new IDs and voting for whatever they want. If you can’t look back at the profile and determine whether it’s a real, non-spam account, it’s a pretty big issue unfortunately.

    You also have an issue where someone could potentially vote with “your” ID without any way to detect that it’s not actually “you” who sent the vote.


  • Comparing to democracy doesn’t make sense, as democracy has mechanisms to ensure 1 person = 1 vote. The internet has no such mechanism. If we did, I’d be all for private voting.

    I know, it’s an issue, but there are certainly ways to solve it, like having the vote identity split between multiple servers that can still confirm with each other that the vote is valid, but neither would reveal the actual identity to make it traceable back.

    Sounds like those people doing the ostracizing should get moderated if they can’t handle being downvoted.

    That’s unfortunately not how it often works. Small, ostracized and vulnerable groups often get taken advantage of. As an example, imagine I want to make a good faight argument around, say, a political topic like Russia. Or a sensitive topic like paedophilia. Or about abortion or trans rights in a religious subreddit. Chances are I’d get downvoted to oblivion, even if the consensus (at least originally on Reddit) was that downvotes should not be used to simply disagree with someone. But at least I “opt into” that, by putting myself out there, knowing that the comment will be attached to my name.

    But that’s not really the standard with votes, and them being public has a chilling effect, makes it easy to harass people just for (dis)agreeing with something, etc. We should find a way to make votes more private, not less.

    Besides, if a dickhead wants to see the votes today, they can find them - votes are public, Lemmy just doesn’t display them in the UI.

    Yes, the votes are already kinda public, but there’s still at least some barrier to it, and most people either don’t know or care enough.