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Fundamental problems with private voting Question Features poll (piefed.social)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/piefed_meta@piefed.social
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Several months ago I have PieFed users the option to vote privately, where an alt/sockpuppet account automatically votes on their behalf. Since then I've been watching to see how it turned out.

  • Finding bigots who upvote transphobia (etc) is harder. To work around this, piefed shares the real vote with trusted instances, BUT:
  • trusted instances Announce votes using the primary to untrusted instances, so the privacy doesn't work most of the time
  • Maintaining a list of trusted instances is a pain in the ass.
  • People always ask why their instance isn't trusted
  • Figuring out who the primary account is, could be quite easy if you have technical skills and a little knowledge of how ActivityPub works. It's not truly 100% private.

Plus, cases of admins/mods abusing their knowledge of who downvoted them have been very rare, lately. This removes most of the reason for private voting in the first place.

I'm starting to feel like private voting is not working and can't really be made to work. Thoughts?

63% Get rid of private voting
14% Keep private voting and make no changes
23% Keep private voting and try harder to make it work
35 votes - ended 1 year ago
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[–] 3 points 1 year ago (1 child)

Seems like you already have an answer in mind but needs little bit nudging (and assurances) from the community : )

I am indifferent about the feature. I don't use it but I think the option is nice, though as you suggested it barely works. Seems like a stuff you should put on backburner for now.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago

    I agree. I fully understand why a user would want private voting. However, the voting data has actually done a lot of good at helping detect/prevent vote manipulation and sock puppet accounts. The community of instance administrators have built up a host of techniques to help keep lemmy/mbin/piefed a little nicer and public voting is a very useful tool in that respect.

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