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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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[–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

The work has to be done at the account creation stage by the home instance, motivated by the fact that if they let people signup with little scrutiny then their instance won't get to participate in voting. The ease of unaccountable creation of accounts is the real issue here. We can all create fake accounts and manipulate votes still, the tools to address that across a decentralized network is what's needed most. I think there is a lack of willingness to think through and build these solutions because they are indeed hard work but they are worth it. Wouldn't the fediverse be better if we could limit a person to one vote on all their accounts? It's a thing we really could figure out, but we don't have a chance if as a community we struggle to imagine what the power of this will be when it lands in the hands of someone we hate. AI companies don't have to make a deal with Reddit anymore, governments don't have to get a warrant from a judge, we're just giving it all to them.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    this basically boils down to requiring globally unique identifiers of users, and then still having them tied to voting, to ensure people can't just sign up on multiple instances to vote multiple times.

    this isn't an issue with hard work, this is an issue with how much identifying information are you willing to collect and store, as well as requiring users to provide this. maybe you would be okay with providing your id on signup, but the majority of people won't be okay with that. this is also not data that i would want to store as a server operator, as this is a huge liability.

    once you have this kind of unique identifier, and that allows you to prevent the same person from voting again, how do you imagine this could be done in a private fashion? it is just not possible. especially when considering your arguments about law enforcement requests, this would be even more transparent.

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