18
Fundamental problems with private voting Question Features poll (piefed.social)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/piefed_meta@piefed.social
48 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] 2 points 1 year ago

Personally, I prefer having votes public. Mbin does this and makes it so that voting data of a post is accessible for everyone so there is no expectation of privacy. For ActivityPub and federation to work, transparency seems to be really important.

Many forums also have "votes" (often called "likes") which are public. The list of people who liked a post in a thread is clearly displayed. Public liking is also present in many mainstream social media like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter (pre-Musk), and TikTok.

I think that voting in social media is just a very simple expression of "I like this, I agree" and "I don't like this, I disagree". Now if association is a concern, then shouldn't comments be anonymous too? I think that the burden of anonymity should be placed on the user. They should be using VPN or Tor if they are really concerned about association. Besides, if it's politics we're talking about, comments are much more valuable than likes in discourse.

I guess it really depends on the type of culture being built. Personally, I would prefer the culture of accountability and discourse.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
    •