Comment on User "threelonmusketeers@sh.itjust.works" is banning users for downvoting his posts.
Skavau@piefed.social 1 day agoI've seen a lot of discussion on this scattered around. I don't sense popular support across the fediverse for going to anonymous voting.
The frustrating thing is that the problems were entirely imagined. Having a voting agent is literally no different from me having a voting alt, except it's only one instead of unlimited. I could write a browser plugin which restores the functionality that could do far more damage, so if a single voting agent is truly a game breaking issue, then the alleged problems are far more fundamental. But they aren't. There was never any actual problem and this whole thing was just shitty forum politics.
Downvote noise from random accounts isn't a problem for 90% of communities most of the time - either they don't have anyone like that, or they're simply too big for them to have any impact. I sense the most obvious problem is when you're growing a community and a handful of downvoters latch on, for want of a better word and continually downvote posts - as I did on my community. Until I removed them.
What plugin could you do more damage with?
socsa@piefed.social 1 day ago
Having a single voting agent per user doesn't change that though. If you've got downvote trolls you can just ban the voting agent just like you could otherwise ban the sockpuppet. All it does it allow actual users to have a small bit important layer of privacy which allowed them to vote on content they might not otherwise choose to comment on. The Charlie Kirk thing is an absolutely perfect example of a scenario where one might want to upvote a meme without taking the risk of joining the conversation. Having that vote registered as xxyyttrreedd instead of "socsa" makes it a lot harder for someone to come back a month or a year later and say "wow, I saw my coworker's account name over their shoulder and I can't believe they voted on this meme."
Skavau@piefed.social 1 day ago
Sorry, so you mean obfuscating identities of voters but they could still be seen as separate 'agents'? So in that way a community owner could ban downvoters, they just wouldn't know who got banned?
socsa@piefed.social 1 day ago
Yes, that is exactly how the original piefed implementation worked, which was a fantastic compromise between true anonymous voting and the need for community management. But this wasn't enough for a small subset of admins and mods who did not actually thing the issue through, and took offense under the guise of "vote brigading."
Skavau@piefed.social 1 day ago
I don't recall piefed showing you any voter details before Rimu changed it. I recall it being completely anonymous, and only deweighting downvoters if they did X downvotes in a row (meaning their downvote wouldn't count locally). Then he changed it, and added non-federated voting.
But supposing we have a sort of proxy voting system, whereby a downvote by you is identified under a proxy name - if you got banned by a community moderator for voting like that, wouldn't they instantly see who you were by checking the community ban list?