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Lemmy vote aggregation idea (sopuli.xyz)

submitted 3 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

24 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 weeks ago

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.