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Comment on Lemmy votes ARE public, should they be anonymous?

otter@lemmy.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

Should the Lemmy devs create a way to make the votes anonymous?

I’m not sure if there is a good way to have the content federate anonymously. Even if there was, it would be a vector for spam.

Vote manipulation is a growing problem on Reddit, and it’s only getting worse with all the AI spam bots. They don’t have an incentive to stop it and it’s only going to get worse.

Admins need to know if the votes/likes coming in are legitimate, else they should block them. It’s too easy to abuse anonymous votes to affect how content and ideas are ranked.

I left a long comment in the other thread which I will link in a moment, but I think either

We keep the current setup, but we put in more effort to make new users aware that vote records are visible to admins/mods
We make it public for everyone and take steps to deal with the new issues that it could cause

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Dave@lemmy.nz ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

Admins need to know if the votes/likes coming in are legitimate, else they should block them. It’s too easy to abuse anonymous votes to affect how content is ranked.

This is a very real problem right now. Admins that are on to it use the votes to identify swarms of users that follow each other around upvoting each other’s spam/troll posts.

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- Socsa@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  And that is still possible with pseudonymous tokens votes. You just end up banning tokens for malicious voting activity, and users for malicious posting activity. It’s at best a very mild adjustment to moderation workflows.
  
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  - Dave@lemmy.nz ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    How does this work? The community issues federates votes but with a linked token instead of a linked user? How do you track vote manipulation across different communities on different instances?
    
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    Socsa@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    As far as I understand it all activity originates from the home instance, where users are interacting with federated copies of posts. The unique user token from a well behaving instance follows the user across the fediverse, allowing bulk moderation for voting patterns using that token. The only difference is that it is not explicitly tied to a given user string. That means moderation for vote manipulation gets tracked via a user’s vote token, and moderation for trolling/spam/rule violations happens via their display name. It may be possible that a user is banned from voting but not commenting and vice versa. It’s is a fairly minor change in moderation workflow, which brings a significant enhancement to user privacy.
    
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andrewrgross@slrpnk.net ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I will also add that I think in the long run, as we try to figure out how to differentiate between humans and machines, the only real reliably solution I see is to focus on elevating the individual. Having people with long histories validate their reality by living and documenting it.

I don’t upvote something that I’d be ashamed for someone to see I upvote. I might make an exception for pornographic content, but even with that, if it’s pseudononymous in that it’s not attached to my personal public life, I don’t mind if someone can trace through and see what a specific account I use for those purposes has liked and disliked.

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Socsa@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
The current trust model already relies on a user’s home instance accurately reporting user activity and not injecting fake activity. Hiding real user votes behind pseudonymous tokens doesn’t change that at all.

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