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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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[–] 2 points 1 year ago

private voting has already been changed to non-federated voting, so the original point is no longer relevant, but it absolutely is your problem if you want your votes to have any meaning. otherwise you could just not vote. if your instance is just telling me there are 20 accounts that vote very similar and I don't have means to verify authenticity of those accounts I'd rather ban them all and if you get caught in that then your votes don't matter anymore at all, at least as far as federation to my instance is concerned. otherwise I could just create a bunch of alts and downvote all your content, after all nobody could verify if this is coming from authentic users.

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