Everyone I have something very important to say about The Agora.
The Problem
Let me be super clear here to something people don’t seem to understand about lemmy and the fediverse. Votes mean absolutely nothing. No less than nothing.
In the fediverse, anyone can open a instance, create as many users as they want and one person can easily vote 10,000 times. I’m serious. This is not hard to do.
Voting at best is a guide to what is entertaining.
As soon as you allow a incentive the vast majority of votes will be fake. They might already be mostly fake.
If you try to make any decision using votes as a guide someone WILL manipulate votes to control YOU.
one solution (think of others too!)
A counsel of trusted users.
The admin, top mods may set up a group to decide on who to ban and what instances to defederate from. You will not get it right 100% of the time but you also won’t be controlled by one guy in his basement, running 4 instances and 1,000 alts.
Now i’m gonna go back to shit posting.
This topic came up in a couple of posts here before, with different proposed solutions like
- “only local users should have a vote”
- “only trusted users should have a vote”
- “only paying users should have a right to vote”
I too see the potential for fake votes becoming a problem, but at the moment i don’t like the solutions.
at some point we probably will have to vote on it. ;)
Edit: typo and formating
Sure but it’s like the problem on voting for the solution is you are gonna have the guy with 50 votes voting on the solution.
Based on your username and post history it’s pretty clear why you’re against the democratic process.
This is not a safe space for people that believe the way you do. This will never be a haven for hateful ignorance like yours.
Try Parler, or or one of the other right wing echo chambers.
Stop trying to turn this website into your own personal hateful circlrjerk, it’s not gonna happen.
This place is not for you.
Says the guy using his alt and getting sudden upvotes
I’m not on an alt. I’m getting upvotes because I’m right and you’re wrong. What the fuck are you even talking about? Are you trying to troll? Is this your sad attempt at trolling?
You clearly have no idea what you’re talking about. Just stop trying. Your username alone proves that you’re a bullshit liar and here in bad faith.
Go away.
You have not even remotely addressed my concerns. You have not disproven them. They are demonstrably true. Your refusal to address them is further proof it’s a valid concern
What is demonstrably true should be demonstrated to demonstrate its demonstrability.
Do you want me to make ten alts, vote ten times and take a screenshot?
Bad actors gonna act. How do we determine a council of trusted users? The idea of the agora is to avoid power in the hands of the few because those few might be or become the problem.
I’m not saying your argument is wrong but if someone wants to manipulate a community bad enough, they will find a way.
When the community it big enough to worry about voter manipulation then there will be resources to counter it.
Feels kinda big now. Anyway I don’t think you are gonna get better than a few trusted users. Federation already protects against power being in the hands of a few or one.
I just have seen so much manipulation in voting and trolling I don’t see why anyone would think votes from anonymous users mean anything at all.
Then we lose basically all voting power and it’s just people who don’t represent the community voting on behalf of us. There should be some limit on the voting like old users with posts and comments that consistently post and engage with the community. I don’t think there are that many botted accounts on this instance yet.
It’s just gonna be a race to see who can have the most alts.
Bots are everywhere here BTW. And because of federation bots from other instances can be used here .
The only way a council of trusted users could work (and still maintain democratic legitimacy)is if it’s chosen by something like sortition for each issue individually. This would be from a larger pool of active and at least verified non-bot users.
Even with that, the tools to set this up don’t exist, and it would require far more community participation than is likely to actually happen. Without going through a process like sortition you end up with a council of clerics effectively ruling by decree.
The exact solution is difficult. That’s why no one has done it, but the proposed method is clearly flawed with many ways to game it by a few bad actors.
Sure, but your solution is to abandon democracy entirely and rely on someone to rule over you. I’d rather the effort be put into making democracy work.
Great. How?
I already said sortition is a possibile solution that could eventually be implemented. I’m sure the community can come up with others as different problems arise.
I already said sortition is a possibile solution that could eventually be implemented.
sortition, solecting a sample of votes? How is selection a sample from a pool of 500 votes where 200 are fake a possible solution though?
The pool of potential voters would need some level of verification for activity and status as a real person, so no fresh accounts or easy botting. It also increases the level of effort required to manipulate a vote, there’s no guarantee for a hostile actor to actually get randomly selected enough to affect whatever votes they want.
I don’t think it’s foolproof, but I’m sure there are workable solutions to any issues.
Closest to a workable solution i’ve seen yet. The problem I have with these sort of tactics is this is basically how shadow banning became a thing. The war against bots made it so you never eve knew if your comments where being seen.
I’m not entirely opposed. But gaining membership in this trusted subset of users should be a fairly open process somehow. Like, have a community where people can post an intro about themselves, have conversations about themselves with others, and, if most superusers who bother to vote deem them human enough, they are inducted into the club.
I have no idea of how the trusted users would be chosen. For starters though, I recommend they be proven real humans. They can always primarily use another alt to keep their privacy.
This is a valid concern. Our procedure for voting requires that a user comment Aye/Nay. Therefore, anyone is free to view the user profile to assess whether they might be a bot.
We will continue to assess whether we can better protect the decision making process from bots, but due to the small size of this forum, it would seem fairly tricky to influence the vote just yet.
Rest assured that we won’t be fooled by one guy in his basement running 1,000 alts.
In the fediverse, anyone can open a instance, create as many users as they want and one person can easily vote 10,000 times. I’m serious. This is not hard to do.
No. We will not be accepting 10,000 votes from Lulzsec.troll in our Agora threads. This is an easy problem to solve.
Then you will need to check every single votes profile. Ensure they have a valid history, with active comments and post. And then you will still likely be dealing with power users who maintain a dozen or more alts.
Bots can mimic this type of thing very easily BTW. You can write scripts to just repost top reddit post, hacker news post.
There are so many ways to game the system I just don’t understand what you actually expect to accomplish with votes.
I will check every profile. If people have dozens of alts with active, legitimate comment histories within a month of the platform forming, then I commend them for their activity.
We are following a democratic process here. We aren’t delegating the decision making to an oligarchy, even if it would simplify things.
There is no example of the system being manipulated thus far. Wait until you have evidence of that occurring before fearmongering like this.
We are following a democratic process here. We aren’t delegating the decision making to an oligarchy, even if it would simplify things.
Yes you are because the people swaying the vote will be users with dozens of accounts aka the Oligarchs.
Your example of a “democratic process” is one user having 50 votes and another user having 1. If one user is 50 times more powerful than the other that isn’t democracy is it? That is apartheid.
To prove it I would literally have to do it myself.
What is your goal on this server?
If your intentions are pure, there is no reason for you to do something like that. If you witness people manipulating votes, by all means, come forward. But what is the point of posing this hypothetical, and suggesting that you would manipulate the vote?
Read and post content? What is your goal?
Ok. Go right ahead.
Do you want to decide how we make decisions here or do you want to read and post content?
I just want to build an alternative to reddit. And I want it to be enjoyable for the users.
This is in fact an example of me reading, posting , and commenting.
to prove it I would literally have to do it myself
So no one else is doing this? If it’s not a thing that’s happening, why are you here trying to undermine the voting process?
You’re the only one here threatening to abuse the voting system.
Oh yeah because people usually warn others before attempting to manipulate others
:/
Find people that are clearly using bots. It’s easy to do. It’s only hard if those user do not exist.
I can do it myself and show you it’s possible. It’s not hard. Actually I can walk you through it
While I like the idea of the agora, and have seen genuine debate on the issues presented there. I can’t help but also agree with this. It’s hard for multi-billion dollar companies to keep bots from ruining their services, and comparatively lemmy has little defense. I don’t know if I like the idea of blocking it off for only a few moderators to make the decisions either, but at the same time I can’t think of a better alternative.
Check this guy’s post history and consider his motivations.
What motivations? Not wanting other users to be manipulated? My shit posting history does not disprove an obvious logical/technical flaw.
I’m not really sure what the best solution is but open voting is obviously not going to work with open federation and users not being validated as real humans. If someone wants me to write a bot and prove what i’m saying I can totally do it. In fact I probably will if votes are used in the future just to prove how easily it is to manipulate things.
