Yes, that is exactly how the original piefed implementation worked, which was a fantastic compromise between true anonymous voting and the need for community management. But this wasn't enough for a small subset of admins and mods who did not actually think the issue through, and took offense under the guise of "vote brigading."
socsa
joined 1 year ago
Having a single voting agent per user doesn't change that though. If you've got downvote trolls you can just ban the voting agent just like you could otherwise ban the sockpuppet. All it does it allow actual users to have a small but important layer of privacy which allows them to vote on content they might not otherwise choose to comment on. The Charlie Kirk thing is an absolutely perfect example of a scenario where one might want to upvote a meme without taking the risk of joining the conversation. Having that vote registered as xxyyttrreedd instead of "socsa" makes it a lot harder for someone to come back a month or a year later and say "wow, I saw my coworker's account name over their shoulder and I can't believe they voted on this meme."
The voting agents can still be identified and banned. As with all of these imagined issues, a single permanent voting agent introduces no actual vulnerability above normal sockpuppets without voting agents. Misbehave in the votes, ban the voting agent. Misbehave in the comments, ban the user. In terms of just vote manipulation, it literally does not reduce the effort of the troll or increase the work of the mod.
What debate? This was discussed mostly in a discord stovepipe. There was one open thread about it in the piefed meta community which never showed up in my feed.
The frustrating thing is that the problems were entirely imagined. Having a voting agent is literally no different from me having a voting alt, except it's only one instead of unlimited. I could write a browser plugin which restores the functionality that could do far more damage, so if a single voting agent is truly a game breaking issue, then the alleged problems are far more fundamental. But they aren't. There was never any actual problem and this whole thing was just shitty forum politics.
We've been over this before. I believe my ability to explicitly control how my information and privacy is handled on the fediverse is far more important than fake Internet points, especially when you can eliminate the impact of vote brigading by just reducing the impact of downvotes, or let a mod selectively wipe downvotes, or selectively make a post immune to downvotes. There are many ways to handle this which are better than the status quo. There's absolutely no reason why every action I make on the fediverse ahould be saved in plaintext in a thousand different places so that a person can be protected from seeing a largely inconsequential negative number on a UI. It's absolutely insane that so many people who are otherwise so concerned with privacy and cyber security even attempt to defend this.
They don't actually give a shit about Charlie Kirk. They just want a catalyst for their enabling acts.
You know you want to
They usually won't be near the fruit at night. They have nests where they gather for warmth.
It was absolutely the reason why I switched. I know several other people who made accounts for the same reason.
Mostly I'm talking about various algorithmic ways to diminish or eliminate the influence of downvotes for post ranking purposes. Nothing that can be done without forking Lemmy or piefed unfortunately. Even something like downvotes don't actually rank posts, but enough of them will auto-report content would be better than what we have.
It's unfortunate that nobody wants to put serious effort into this kind of thing though, because it feels like admins are addicted to the tiny amount of insider power which comes with watching public votes, so there's no incentive to implement features which might allow closing that obnoxious privacy hole.
Piefed's original surge in popularity was arguably due to the main dev quickly implementing a voting agent function for pseudonymous voting. It wasn't perfect but it worked quite well until a bunch of other admins got butthurt about it and basically convinced rimu to abandon the idea in some discord back channels.
I have been vocal about my opinion that this was a mistake, and that public voting is the number one biggest issue with the fediverse at the moment (besides tankies, but that's a problem which will wither away with more users). Nothing good can come out of public voting though. People have this idea that it's some panacea for vote manipulation, but there are way better ways to handle that than IMO
The way it was implemented was that a user was basically two accounts - one voted, one commented. You could ban either one without knowing the other. The point being that if the issue was vote manipulation, you could ban the voting agent and be done with it. If the issue was as content violation then you could ban the other account and be done with it. It was literally just like having an app where you can log in with two accounts at once and choose which one to use to vote vs comment.