this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2023
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Reading these comments, seeing so many excuses, sarcastic responses, and handwaving, makes me realize a great deal of users really need to develop some imagination.
This is not about privacy. It's about data that can easily be used for targeting and profiling users, and how that creates countless avenues for targeted harassment and wide scale retaliation. It's about all of the innumerable ways public vote information can and will be abused to manipulate scoring across the site with targeted/automated shadow banning and shared blocklists. Raise your hand if you trust every single admin to never abuse such a tool to curate the outward appearance of an instance to fit a narrative.
For a different example: I could say something about how great Nazis are right now, and have a bot programmed to read every single person that downvoted me, add those names to a shared blocklist, and viola, I've made myself and all my alts invisible to the people that would challenge me on a massive scale.
I promise you this is going to be a big issue as tools for this site get more sophisticated over time.
alternatively, if votes were private, you could spin up a bot network to mass upvote your comment; making it far more influential as most people are more inclined to believe statements they think others also feel. thankfully, votes are open, so you can't
as long as there is a system, people will try to game the system; and when there is a new system, people will come up with new games
I agree with you about harassment issues, and the importance of controlling the transfer of admin-level data between instances, but for your last scenario, doesn’t blocking only apply to users who are logged in? Assuming your hypothetical tankies and Nazis were actually posting as well as blocking, it would be easy to find them just by logging out, and there are a lot of ways to get them banned or otherwise counteract their activities that don’t require someone to interact directly with them while logged in. The case you’re describing is not the kind of situation where the most important action is to argue with them. Arguing with extremists usually just validates their delusions, and encourages them to keep doing what they’re doing.
While I agree this shouldn't be so publicly accessible, I'm curious about the possible benefits of limited sharing between instances to give spam/bot detection tool's more power.
Users on A vote on a post on B. The admins from A and B can see the fine details of who did what, but the admins of C (and all of the general users regardless of instance) just see totals of up/down votes.
Ideally, detecting bots should be up to the Admins. They should have access to the vote information, and they can share the tools with other admins to detect it. But the average user should not have unrestricted access to this data.
The average user can run their own instance as an admin.
Let me be a little more clear, the Admins of your account's particular instance should be the only ones that have access to your votes.
Now the question remains about when your account posts/comments into a different instance, who should have access to those votes? Perhaps your instance has a way of obfuscating the votes of any user coming from your instance, or else only the admins of the community that you're posting into will have access to your votes?
The problem really comes down to how we avoid the problem with duplicating votes. Currently this is easy as each vote is public so every instance can verify the correct vote count. But implementing either of the solutions above will need a way to verify the correct number of votes.
To top it off you would also need a way to detect if a malicious instance had come along and started lying about how many votes had been cast.
One thing we can look at under the hood would be how cryptocurrency works as they have solved both the problem of duplicate values as well as the ability to trust those values being sent. All of the code is free and open source so we can pick out the parts that we need and reuse it. (And no, I'm not telling people to go out and buy crypto).
Z Cash would be a particularly good one to look at as it ensures a "zero knowledge" (or "zero trust") method of sending the values across "nodes" (or in our case "instances"). Using this, who is voting on what would be hidden, but we could ensure that the values are correct.
Additionally you could probably throw out the second hashing algorithm altogether and just keep the Blake2b hashing algorithm as this one is far more efficient and quick to compute (and that second algorithm was mostly thrown in to prevent people with specialized hardware from being able to come in and beat anyone else running on just a GPU/CPU). https://github.com/zcash/zcash
However, using this particular method would make it so that not even the instance admins would be able to view the details of anyone's votes (which may be a good thing after all if we decide that any random instance admin is not to be trusted).
There’s no need to complicate things by bringing crypto buzzwords into it. It’s already been solved faster, better, and easier just like everything else cryptobros invent a problem for.
The crypto example was only a suggestion because they have simply solved the exact same problem we are looking at: duplicate votes (transactions) and verifying the results while being able to hide it.
I would love to hear any other suggestions that people may have that solve these problems. Copying open source code from crypto isn't the only option. So let's look for solutions instead of dismissals (unless you're arguing for keeping votes public of course).