Comment on Lemmy devs are considering making all votes public - have your say
maegul@lemmy.ml 4 weeks agoHmmm … 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.
x00z@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
Hence why I gave a solution. It would simply become spam that should be handled by the instance where it originates from.
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.