Comment on Lemmy devs are considering making all votes public - have your say
SorteKanin@feddit.dk 4 weeks agoHow? The ActivityPub protocol has no support for private votes. Also, private votes would be private for mods and admins as well, which would make downvote brigading and vote manipulation very hard to detect and moderate.
maegul@lemmy.ml 4 weeks ago
Hmmm … is it not really possible at all? Just riffing here … the identity of a voter isn’t necessary, just a means to ensure the uniqueness of a voter so there’s no duplication etc. So … could a hash of the voter’s ID be distributed with the vote to prevent duplication?
SorteKanin@feddit.dk 4 weeks ago
In ActivityPub, no, not at the moment.
How would you verify that such a hash is coming from a real user? What if an instance sends 1000 fake hashes as votes?
x00z@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
What’s the difference from users though?
You’d give each user an anonymous vote ID that only the instance can link back to their username.
SorteKanin@feddit.dk 4 weeks ago
Imagine you have 500 users that consisently upvote each other and 500 users that vote randomly on different posts. If you jumble up those 500+500 in 1000 random hashes, it becomes impossible to distinguish who is part of the voting ring and who isn’t.
maegul@lemmy.ml 4 weeks ago
Yea … that makes sense. Thanks!
Still … intuitively it feels like if the “threadiverse” platforms weren’t so concerned with interoperating with the likes on microblogging platforms, they could come up with a system that involved only sharing total vote numbers from their instance without any idenfifying metadata.
SorteKanin@feddit.dk 4 weeks ago
Only sharing aggregate votes could also lead to a lot of issues with vote manipulation, as it is very easy to manipulate such an aggregate.
I agree that ActivityPub is biased around microblogging though. For all its flexibility and universality, it is surprisingly catered to that use case.