Comment on Lemmy devs are considering making all votes public - have your say

• FiskFisk33@startrek.website ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  That would be great. I’m not sure how to solve the problems that arises though. If i can send an anonymous vote to an instance, what stops me from sending 100?
  Maybe there’s some smart cryptographical solution here that alludes me, but it seems hard, if possible.

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  • Feathercrown@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    You could just hash your username+instance combo, right?

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    • FiskFisk33@startrek.website ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      hmm, how would the receiving instance verify? what happens if I send 100 random hashes?

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      • Socsa@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        This is literally already a problem. I can easily set up an instance and write a simple bot which just spams votes with randomized user strings. There are generally a bunch of these functional vulnerabilities in the AP trust model which are only mitigated by the current lack of scale. Work needs to be put into reworking the trust model, not exposing user telemetry to even more people.

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      • Feathercrown@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        Each instance could store a static private key used to hash all usernames in that instance maybe?

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• Linkerbaan@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  There are good reasons why votes a secret in democracies.

  Because voters only receive a voting ballot after they identify themselves as a real citizen with a real passport?

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  • LifeInMultipleChoice@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Passport required? Shit, most of our country would be ineligible to vote as they can’t afford to travel out of the country for vacations enough to keep up to date passports. Valid up to date passports are around 40% of the population in the U.S. I believe it is trending up though. Pre 9-11 they were way lower. (Because you didn’t really need a passport to go on short trips, just an ID)

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• SorteKanin@feddit.dk ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Then again, private votes would be private for mods and admins too. So no more moderating vote brigading or downvote abuse or anything like that.

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  • IlovePizza@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Good point. Would it be useful to somewhat anonymize them by giving every user a unique code? So admins would see these codes but not easily know what users they represent.

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    • SorteKanin@feddit.dk ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      I’m afraid this may enable a malicious instance to use this mechanism to manipulate votes while making it much harder to detect. I think transparent voting is much preferable.

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      • Iceblade02@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        If we look at any of the big social media platforms with public votes, that has not prevented voting abuse through bots and the like. Rather it has served to fuel online harrassment campaigns and value of influential individuals votes (ooh Bill Gates liked X, Kamala Harris disliked Y etc.)

        Aggregating votes rather than having individually visible votes serves the purpose of shifting focus to how the community values of the content. It’s the same reason that we follow communities rather than people.

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• SomeGuy69@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Even on github they are public. Lol

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