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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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[–] 4 points 1 year ago (6 children)

the way i see it, social media is a public forum, and while in public people need to be held accountable for their actions. hiding this data only ever puts obstacles in the way of people who want to get something done but dont have the motivation to do something about it. a sufficiently motivated person will find a way around the private voting, but the average user will not. providing the data publicly only adds to the accountability of people on your platform.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    Any dedicated adversary can still break into my house. Why do I put locks on my doors? Why don't I give my keys to everyone I meet? There is still utility in preventing the vast majority of other users from using your voting information against you.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    People will just create an anonymous account that’s not linked to their identity like the old social media. There’s something funny about the fact I am having to defend private voting on here as the only person not using a pseudonym. Without private voting anyone like me who believes that it’s important to be accountable will just have to switch to a sock puppet account because I don’t want such a massive 100x volume of data on what I think about everything I read dumped on the internet.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    The chilling effect of public voting is also definitely a problem. Maybe users will think twice about upvoting that controversial post about ICE, or downvoting a post from a community moderator. Keeping people honest works both ways in this regard.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Yes. One consequence of everything you vote on so easily being monitored is less engagement on the fediverse. For example, I've been stopped at the border and investigated for a few hours. If I vote on reddit, that border guard doesn't have easy access to that and it's only the guard on the US border. This on the other hand, anyone, anywhere. Way too easy: https://lemvotes.org/user/CoyoteFacts@piefed.ca

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