this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2023
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The Agora

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[Discussion] polls on policy change should be secret ballot (self.agora)
submitted 1 year ago by sorghum to c/agora
13 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

To prevent fracturing of our instance and retaliation against users for votes you don't agree with.

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[–] nonfuinoncuro 17 points 1 year ago (4 children)

My suggestion here would allow for this:

The current aye/nay system is cluttered and clunky. How about we allow comments in [discussion] posts and then have a separate [vote] post with a single comment for each option so people can choose up/down/abstain? Then nobody has to count anything, human or bot, or worry about typos, formatting, sarcasm, etc.

I also propose a minimum of 3 days, maximum of 1 week per each [vote], no time limits for discussion. You can choose when to start the official [vote] after discussion starts.

[–] imaqtpie 3 points 1 year ago

This is a fantastic idea. Not sure about the time limits but the [vote] post seems like it would work really well

[–] MrScottyTay 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I don't know if a separate post is required for that kind of mechanic and could instead just be comments made by the poster on the main thread.

I don't know how well you could police voting through upvotes if we end up deciding we want to limit exactly who can vote or when they can vote. (I'm for all being able to vote, but may be swayed on when they can vote to be transparent)

[–] Gongin 1 points 1 year ago

Screen shot posted on the vote thread of the results at the expiration of the time?

[–] aspseka 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

We're just about to agree on the condition that only members of this instance should be allowed to vote. I am afraid that your proposal might not be compatible with that at the moment...

[–] sugar_in_your_tea 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Since votes are public, it's probably possible to write a moderator tool to tally votes based on instance of the voter. As a developer, I'm happy to implement that if wanted.

[–] sneakyninjapants 3 points 1 year ago

If this is doable I would be for the proposal. Current system is transparent, but messy and a target for retaliation. Proposal with just upvotes / downvotes isn't transparent (wanted in this case), but also allows for voting from users outside this server with no way to separate their votes out of the count. Though that hasn't even been decided on definitively. In addition if a tool like this could be extended to incorporate more functions like finding minimum account age, comment/post requirements, etc. It could be very useful.

[–] tcely 1 points 1 year ago

Something similar to your suggestion might work.

I made an example with more than two options.

https://sh.itjust.works/post/248271

[–] haxe11 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I agree they should be secret, but I can't think of how they can be made that way cleanly without using a service external to Lemmy.

[–] ArtisanalRuntime 2 points 1 year ago

Examples of ideas we most likely won't do:

Here's decentraland's agora: https://agora.decentraland.org/ And of course, there's a blockchain for that! https://www.agora.vote/technology

But more seriously:

Voting is a tough problem to solve. How do you avoid spam/bots unless the votes are tied to users in some way? Also, how to handle exactly-one-vote-per-user-per-poll? How do you handle the equivalent of ostracising bad actors from the process (maybe not as extreme as the OG-way of banishment for 10 years, though: https://www.greece-is.com/understanding-the-agora)?

Maybe some system that involves (some service or the mods?) privately pushing out (via DM?) a one-time-use code (UUID?) for casting a vote in a poll once it's got enough weight to be put to a vote? OTP SurveyMonkey? Is there some way to prevent back-tracing of the vote-codes/tokens to individuals? If someone becomes a problem, then I guess they just stop getting vote-codes pushed to them. Slippery slope, etc. etc., though.

[–] panopticchaos 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Unless something changed Up/down Votes on Lemmy/kbin aren’t exactly secret

[–] sneakyninjapants 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Aren't they? I took it as meaning "you don't know who upvoted / downvoted" not "you don't know the total upvotes / downvotes", or is there something I'm not seeing?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

On Kbin you can view the Activity for any post and comment which shows who up voted and down voted (called favorites and reduces respectively).