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.
Dave@lemmy.nz 1 month ago
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.
Socsa@sh.itjust.works 1 month 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.
Dave@lemmy.nz 1 month 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?
Socsa@sh.itjust.works 1 month 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.