Alright, this one will be weird but I’m coming to accept I might be way further on the spectrum than I thought. Reader beware, it’s probably dumb but kind of amusing and fun to think about.
We are currently dealing with various kinds of vote manipulation and that affects visibility of things even if we don’t care about imaginary points. As long as they are used for sorting they’re not that imaginary because I can sort by new but most will not have time and will want to peek. Now, the main issue here are the extremes - instances used to flood votes or weirdos stalking other users.
Currently Lemmy/Piefed/Mbin create a federated network but votes are still kind of a direct democracy. What if that democracy was federated too? One can think of this as federating consensus. There are two approaches to implementing this but the idea boils down to either outside instances aggregating votes made on their side and sending final voting result on a scale -1/0/1 or alternatively this aggregation could be done by the hosting community.
What this solves:
- Flooding is harder because you need to keep on making instances.
- People have more motivation to join smaller instances because that way their vote matters more.
- People have more motivation to join interest / theme / location based instances so that their vote is aggregated with similar people.
- Weirdos will set up their own instances meaning even more decentralisation.
No crazy scheme like this will work, because creating any form of anonymous account is super easy.
What we need is to add a layer of trust assignment and authorization system based on reputation, like what Fediseer does but built-in into the application. Then we can quarantine new users, contain their actions until the admin gives explicit approval, auto reject follows if they don’t have at least N trusted people vouching for them, etc…
Because the Electoral College has worked out so well for us here in the US. /s
As someone who’s actual real life votes have been watered down all my life, I really don’t want to apply that logic elsewhere.
Why not just make new account’s votes only count for 3/5 of a vote and send those in aggregate? /s
The real solution is to be aware of unmoderated / malicious instances. Vote manipulation is something I actively watch for, and I didn’t even see this campaign because I’d already defederated from both of the identified instances as they were already frequent sources of spam. After looking into them, neither seemed actively moderated and both had open signups. Doesn’t take a rocket surgeon to figure out how that’s going to end up.
Being aware of abuse means monitoring and maintenance - more work for admins. I prefer hands off / systemic way of fixing things and this is more like anarcho-syndicalism than an electoral college. Probably similar ideas at the root of things but very different execution.
We’re voting on posts and not heads of state here anyway. In this analogy USA would have to allow you to carve out a bit of land and present yourself as an equal to Florida. This is an intentional backdoor for people who hate this idea enough.
I don’t think this is a good idea. I would prefer the votes of new accounts having a lower impact.
Lemmy version 1.1.0 will include the ability for mods to remove votes. Hopefully also logged to the modlog, because we know some mods will use it for some other purpose.
Ah, there’s even an option to turn off vote types selectively at the federation level, that’s pretty cool! This is kind of like my other pipe dream of vote weight being different based on whether it’s local or federated.
So basically the electoral college? No thanks.
Just sort by new.
Does electoral college allow you to create a state and vote as an equal to any other state whenever you feel like?
Creating a fake instance to send out votes is cheaper and easier that you think. You need only one domain and a script.
It can’t be stopped this way but this is just some friction or increasing barrier to entry to discourage it. Most people are lazy and will just drop it as not worth the effort, and the most persistent will be annoying no matter what you do.
It won’t stop the people interested in doing mass-manipulation of votes. There is no virtual difference between a bot that votes through Lemmy and a bot that votes through “pure” ActivityPub.
Hosting your own instance is not option for the majority of people.
What’s important is that it’s possible if you don’t like any other instance. Maybe once Lemmy gets popular we’ll get commercial hosts offering to spin up a Lemmy instance the same way they offer WordPress.
Removed by mod
Wait, so all the votes from Lemmy.world would have the same weight as the votes from lazysoci.al? Interesting idea
Correct :)
My pet peeve is people downvoting in communities they aren’t subscribed to about posts they aren’t interested in. They just sort by new, and when they see something they don’t like, they smash that downvote button without even looking at the post or contents.
Part of it is because we all have unlimited votes; people vote without thinking. It would be different if everyone had a finite number of votes to use. And you get awarded a few votes for making a comment or post. Maybe award extra votes for commenting in small communities.
This would serve 2 purposes. 1.) People would use their votes a lot more thoughtfully. 2.) It would encourage people to comment and post more.
The downside is that someone could set up a bot to spam posts and comments into a dead community just to rack up votes.
I agree, some seems to think there’s still an algorithm learning their preferences, or that the little ‘down’ arrow is to go to the next post…
I was thinking of this too but then you need to keep track of who’s allowed to vote and that’s weird thing to federate even conceptually.
Something along similar lines is how they do it on Slashdot where users are randomly assigned limited number of points to be used for voting which makes them more precious in general. Tildes is also interesting in that regard because while there are no downvotes there, trusted users can apply labels that serve as something between a reason for downvote and a report. For example comment can be tagged as „noise” for not bringing anything to discussion which automatically ranks it below other comments but not removes it entirely. This prevents jokes being the top reply which is nice. Nothing against jokes but it depends on what kind of content you want others too see on your platform.
the idea boils down to either outside instances aggregating votes made on their side and sending final voting result on a scale -1/0/1 or alternatively this aggregation could be done by the hosting community
Could you provide an example calculation? I’m not getting it. Do you want to map values from one range to another e.g [-1000,1000] to [-1,1]? Will each instance have its own mapping?
Also, computationally, I’m not sure how this is going to work iteratively. From what I understand, activitypub sends events either singular or batched to other servers e.g User X votes up, that’s an event sent, User Y votes down, that’s another event sent. If I’m not mistaken, lemmy doesn’t store the events it receives so reconstituting a vote tally isn’t possible.
I kinda get where you’re coming from, but I’m not sure it’s the right solution.
To me the idea is more important than implementation details because those can be worked out in many different ways as you’ve noticed. If you know what is the goal then you can adjust if you see things not working out as intended.
The most basic approach would be to get positive/negative ratio and decide how much in the middle is still 0.
The forums I’ve enjoyed the most didn’t have voting and I’d rather that Lemmy just shut it off. VBB has a “thank” button you can click on posts, but they still show up in chronological order. That’s less gameable and less subject to outrage amplification and similar social media hazards. This isn’t Facebook and we don’t need to reproduce Facebook’s evil.
kinda fuels centralisation
More like the opposite, being on a smaller instance gives your individual vote more weight
Sort by new (for subscribed only if you don’t want everything).
That’s even how I used to use reddit (I even had a bookmark folder of subreddits with links to the /new/ view).
