this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2023
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It is technically infeasible to make the votes anonymous in a federated protocol like this. Even if a particular instance chooses to hide them, the votes still get sent out to other instances with identities attached.
The only way I can think of to allow anonymized voting in a decentralized manner involves the dreaded word "blockchain", that would result in my comment being downvoted reflexively and me being called a "crypto bro" or something. And it would be complicated, and lots of people are already complaining about the Fediverse being too complicated for them.
Oof, that's quite the pickle then...
Well, you could refrain from voting entirely. I haven't experimented with reskinning Kbin/Lemmy but I've heard people have come up with skins that hide the voting buttons and vote totals. Beehaw has famously removed the downvote button from their instance.
I used to be against removing the downvote button, but honestly, it's used a weapon more than anything else. It's also used as "I disagree with this person" instead of an indicator of the value or veracity of a given post, which is not the intent. As such, I've now come around to the position that removing downvotes is the way to go.
Upvoting if you like a post, or do nothing if you don't is the correct answer I think.
This. Very much this.
There are other ways to sort posts than aggregate difference between arrows. Replace up votes with favourites, or even emoji reacts for fun, and remove downvotes.
They're just not a good tool. They're a crutch from websites that didn't want to invest in moderation and so bet on crowd sourcing.
They ended up with moderators anyway.
My ideal system would have two things to vote on.. whether you like/agree with a comment and whether you think it contributes to the discussion. So you could upvote an entertaining quippy comment but also vote that it doesn't really contribute anything meaningful, and you could downvote something you disagree with while still indicating it adds to the discussion.
I doubt people would use it correctly, but I think its a nice idea in theory.
Hmmm, so on kbin.social we already have that actually! Or we have something close to it.
We have upvotes, downvotes, boosts and reports. Upvotes don't contribute to your reputation right now (apparently that's a bug though, but maybe it's a feature haha). Boosts are supposed to be like a retweet, but I think they're taken into account for sort order too.
So we can already boost meaningful content, and report irrelevant content! Nice! And then for personal takes, we could continue using up/downvotes.
Unfortunately downvotes currently affect reputation, and they're publicly listed, so there's definitely conflict around people unhappy about their negative reputations. I've been fairly liberal with my boosts to try to balance that out lol.
I think that's a great way to think about it, it almost makes me think the comments should stay sorted by the number of boosts
I have thought about the reacts a bit since I saw it brought up. I kind of like the idea. Might make the comments look a little....busy? But they're more expressive than voting and sometimes I just wanna tell someone their comment was really insightful.
Biggest downside, people would inherently call for an Angry react, which would lead to the same behavior we already have with the downvotes. As would absolutely any user-handled way to combat spam
People don't interpret angry reacts as downvotes on other sites. If that's how Redditors have been conditioned to see something like that, maybe reconditioning is necessary?
@HamSwagwich I think that's where I'm at too. Replace downvote with report button. If it's really irrelevant or otherwise breaking the rules let's remove it properly. If it isn't, well. It isn't, so let it stay without punishment.
Edit: Oooh, okay wait. Maybe let downvotes stay but make it benign. We're okay with casual upvotes for agreement. We should be okay with casual downvotes for disagreement. Its does let people see that their comment has been seen as is unpopular, compared with just unnoticed. I'm okay with that style of downvote being private.
I think that's the fundamental problem though. Just because a comment is unpopular doesn't mean it's not valuable or even correct. It's often the unpopular opinions that are the most important. No always, obviously, but social change starts from unpopular opinions. It's a double-edged sword.
@HamSwagwich Oh, yeah, that's why I'm suggesting we just make it benign. Like cosmetic only. We can see the downvote count, but it doesn't affect reputation or sorting.
"There's a bunch of people in the back grumbling about this comment lol." It's anonymous but ignorable. Actual sorting is by upvotes, actual content moderation is by reports.
I really like HackerNew's approach to this. There is a downvote button, but only older, higher reputation accounts get it. Tildes has something similar (ish), in the sense that accounts with reputation get different features.
It's something i want to experiment with some Fediverse software too. I think features like these can help shape community.
@FaceDeer Beehaw removed the downvote button? That's interesting. Did they say why?
I'd guess their argument would be that that the downvote's main purpose is supposed to be to mark irrelevant content, but that's just as easily handled by a report?
That's actually a compelling argument to me. A spammer with a negative reputation almost certainly doesn't care. I'd rather have mods look at someone with too many reports and just ban them and be done with it.
People with acceptable but unpopular opinions ("peanut butter and mayo is the best sandwich") can just have a low non-negative reputation, no need to treat that like a bannable offense lol.
If I remember, it was to foster actual discussion instead of blindly downvoting things. Idk how well that's played out or not. It was one of the things that made me interested in them, initially, Unfortunately, that does not mean whatever petty user who would normally end up downvoted is willing to listen to grievances, and I feel like one of the admins has capitalized on that immunity a few times on a bad day by being more aggressive than they should be. But overall, I can imagine it probably does do more than a little to keep the peace.
No need for a blockchain at all. Each instance would just have to have a service capable of transforming the info "user A upvoted comment" into an anonymized, but verified by the instance, string or key that would say "someone from this instance uniquely upvoted comment". The instance and its admin could still reverse engineer who did it but for the purposes of public, it's anonymous.
Now, how feasible this is to do... that's another question, would probably take a lot of work since it has to work within the confines of AP (or extend it somehow). But it's still better than the damned blockhain lol. And have an performance impact, and probably not work the same way across different AP implementations.
That's changing the AP protocol, which is a huge undertaking, as it affects everyone in the Fediverse at that point, requiring new code to whatever platform that they are using. I think that's the hardest route to go down.
Plus, it's easily forgeable by a rogue instance since only that instance would be able to verify whether the votes were real or fake.
See, as soon as the word "blockchain" is uttered the technical merits of the discussion are lost.
Blockchains have been working on solutions to the problems of running a distributed, decentralized and trustless database for almost fifteen years now. That's exactly what the Fediverse is too. Right now it's able to ignore a lot of the problems that blockchains have had to deal with because there isn't much value at stake, but as it grows there will be spammers and spoofers and all kinds of other bad actors cropping up. Like it or not, blockchains have come up with solutions for these things and there may be no choice but to eventually adopt some of them. Or ditch the "decentralized" feature and go back to being Reddit-like again.
It's not like it'd be any different if you tried to push a blockchain somewhere in there either, my point is just that you can accomplish the same thing by making the instance the authority on validating upvotes while making then anonymous, instead of using a blockchain for that. Can't speak on whether it would require AP changes or not, maybe it has something that can be repurposed to hold this data already, maybe not.
It seems to me like it's something that we can learn to live with as long as it is well-known. Maybe there is a place on the page for a notice that voting is not anonymous.
Could just aggregate at the instance level.
The instance is going to have full visibility into your actions anyway, but federated instances already have to have some trust that other instances aren’t submitting fakes (since they could just as easily fake accounts too).
It's easier to spot fake accounts with suspicious voting habits than it is to detect malfeasance when an instance simply says "there were a thousand upvotes on that from various people, believe me."
Hard disagree.
The aggregation actually simplifies much of that detection.
“Instance X dumps thousands of -1’s (or odd patterns of +1s) on comment/story Y” is much easier to look for bad behavior and run anomoly detection on, especially since bad actors will likely operate at the instance level (either creating many accounts on a low barrier instance or just making bad instances).
Yes totally open votes helps for the edge case of detecting “account X always +1’s account Y” across instances but we’re paying a very heavy privacy cost to support an expensive to detect edge case that’s trivial to defeat (have multiple puppets). And individual instance operators can still do this analysis.
If the number of puppets are small the correct fix is to rethink the scoring (tiny numbers of votes shouldn’t be allowed to distort thing so much we need to go to these extremes)
If the number of puppets is not tiny then it’ll be easier to see in the instance aggregations (user X always gets +N votes from instance Y)
You definitely don't need blockchain for this. But you do need protocol changes. You could have the host instance (ie, the instance the thread/post is in) be the only one that keeps track of votes and have it regularly communicate to other instances how many votes the post has. The host instance would still have to track who voted in what way (to prevent multi voting), but it can keep the identities secret.
It can also freely lie about how many votes things have received and there's no way for other instances to validate what it's claiming.