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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

The entire point, as far as I see it, isn't that this is not meant to be an absolute anonymous function, but that it provides a layer of plausible deniability if my account was doxxed years down the road. I am profoundly uncomfortable with how activitypub makes these things public not just to admins but to anyone on the network, and there are already website popping up to display that activity to anyone. In the future, if my account is doxxed, there's a world of difference between someone being able to query my user activity on a search form, versus needing to forensically link a bunch of anonymized database entries.

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