Comment on Lemmy votes ARE public, should they be anonymous?
RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
I’d rather keep the status quo. While I realize that the vote visibility can play into the hands of mod/admin/instance owners with nefarious or petty vengeful purposes, we also can see who bad actors are in the vote system - iow a bot or person perpetually downvoting subjects they disagree with yet not participating.
But people need to be aware that the votes are not private.
We could split the difference and users could get auto-notified if their vote was viewed and by whom. That way it’s a two-way street. The mod/admin can see your votes, the users know that their vote was accessed by that mod.
Second choice would be that all users are anonymized by a hash so that bad vote actors can be removed via their hash being associated with malicious or other bad acting, but to discover who individuals are the admin would have to do the legwork of follonf multiple posts/ comments to associate the hash.
No perfect solution.
Don’t know how that would be implemented, but someone needs to watch the watchers.
Otherwise hide the votes if trust of anonymity is paramount.
GoodEye8@lemm.ee 4 weeks ago
It would be pointless to do. Anyone can view your votes without notifying you. Just set up your own instance, download the data (that you need to do anyway because of how activitypub works) and then just open up the database with a different software to access the data. No notification can be sent because the application doesn’t know the data was accessed.
This opens a door to vote manipulation because
No perfect solution.
Don’t know how that would be implemented, but someone needs to watch the watchers.
Otherwise hide the votes if trust of anonymity is paramount.
IlovePizza@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
Couldn’t malicious instances use random users aswell? What if there’s some sort of user manifest that shows all users an anonymous hashes belonging to that instance? That way you could check there are the same number of both.