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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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[–] [S] 2 points 1 year ago* (2 children)

Gah. I didn't think of that.

Maybe, by casting a vote in the other direction?

I guess if it public for a second and then immediately removed that's not the end of the world.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Yeah, I think that this paradigm would require a UI change for voting. I can imagine two different scenarios:

    • Like mentioned above, clicking an vote button a second time triggers federation. This would likely require a separate button on the voting bar dedicated to removing your vote.
    • Another option would be to have two upvote buttons/two downvote buttons; a local vote button and a federated vote button. Clicking the federated vote button also votes locally, but not vice versa.

    I think that apps are unlikely to implement something like this, so the api would probably be ok to just stick with only local/only federated based on user preference.

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