The best part of the fediverse is that anyone can run their own server. The downside of this is that anyone can easily create hordes of fake accounts, as I will now demonstrate.

Fighting fake accounts is hard and most implementations do not currently have an effective way of filtering out fake accounts. I’m sure that the developers will step in if this becomes a bigger problem. Until then, remember that votes are just a number.

  • sparr@lemmy.world
    83·
    1 year ago

    Web of trust is the solution. Show me vote totals that only count people I trust, 90% of people they trust, 81% of people they trust, etc. (0.9 multiplier should be configurable if possible!)

      • OsrsNeedsF2P@lemmy.ml
        8·
        1 year ago

        Fwiw, search engines need to figure out what is “reliable”. The original implementations were, well if BananaPie.com is referenced by 10% of the web, it must be super trustworthy! So people created huge networks of websites that all linked each other and a website they wanted to promote in order to gain reliability.

      • sparr@lemmy.world
        3·
        1 year ago

        It could be implemented on both the server and the client, with the client trusting the server most of the time and spot checking occasionally to keep the server honest.

        The origins of upvotes and downvotes are already revealed on objects on Lemmy and most other fediverse platforms. However, this is not an absolute requirement; there are cryptographic solutions that allow verifying vote aggregation without identifying vote origins, but they are mathematically expensive.

      • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
        1·
        1 year ago

        That sounds a bit hyperbolic.

        You can externalize the web of trust with a decentralized system, and then just link it to accounts at whatever service you’re using. You could use a browser extension, for example, that shows you whether you trust a commenter or poster.

        That list wouldn’t get federated out, it could live in its own ecosystem, and update your local instance so it provides a separate list of votes for people in your web of trust. So only your admin (which could be you!) would know who you trust, and it would send two sets of vote totals to your client (or maybe three if you wanted to know how many votes it got from your instance alone).

        So no, I don’t think it needs to be invasive at all.

          • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            1·
            1 year ago

            My point is you can have a mixed system. For example:

            • server stores list of “special interest” users (followed users, WoT, mods, etc)
            • server stores who voted for what (already does)
            • client updates the server’s list of “special interest” users with WoT data
            • when retrieving metadata about a post, you’d get:
              • total votes
              • votes from “special interest” users
              • total votes from your instance

            That’s not a ton of data, and the “special interest” users wouldn’t need to be synchronized to any other instance. The client would store the WoT data and update the server as needed (this way the server doesn’t need any transitive logic, the client handles it).

          • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
            2·
            1 year ago

            I think that could work well. At the very least, I want the feature where I can see how many times I’ve upvoted/down voted a given individual when they post.

            That wouldn’t/shouldn’t give you transitive data imo, because voting for something doesn’t mean you trust them, just that the content is valuable (e.g. it could be a useful bot).

    • nekat_emanresu@lemmy.ml
      3·
      1 year ago

      Love that type of solution.

      I’ve been thinking about an admin that votes on example posts to define the policy, and then getting users scored against it, then using high scorers to represent user copies of the admins spirit of moderation, and then make systems that use that for automoderation.

      e.g. I vote yes, no, yes. I then run the script that checks my users that have voted in all three, and the ones with the highest matching votes that i define(must be 100% matching to my votes) gets counted as “matching my spirit of moderation”. If a spirit of moderation user downvotes or reports then it can be auto flagged into an admin console for me to then rapidly view instead of sifting through user complaints, and if things get critically spicy i can promote them to emergency mods, or automate their reports so that if a spirit user and a random user both report, it gets auto removed.