I missed the discussion on voting the other day it seems, but for what it's worth, I like the voting system. In real life discussions happen in open air, and don't hang there in posterity for people to stumble upon after. When we come to a consensus in conversation it is then left at that and we move on.

When online, these discussions stay as they are, and I think voting gives a way of people to come to a consensus, to leave a mark upon the conversation such that the people who come behind understand how everyone felt about it.

This is helpful I think, because it does not hide the down votes on nasty comments or ideas that hurt others.

One of the most interesting and horrible things about the internet is that every village has a "crazy Bob" but because they were the minority the good of the people outnumbered their outlandish or hateful ideas.

Now they can and do find each other online, forming a vocal and damaging minority. Without the majority able to show their dislike, human nature means more will fall in line with them and their ideals.

Interesting solution 👍 Curious to see how this plays out!

How does this work with moderation? I.e. what happens if I ban the real user from a Lemmy instance? What if I ban the alternate user?

Also, what happens if on Piefed, a user votes for something, then they change the setting and then they vote for the same thing again? How would a Lemmy instance know if it should count the vote or not, since the original user didn't actually vote from Lemmy's point of view?

That's super cool and amazing that you implemented it so quickly.

So now I have a PieFed account :)

I'm surprised most people are against public votes. Most people already seem to have an anonymous account via some weird username not connected to their real identity already. What difference does it make that votes can be viewed, other than for transparency during discussion?

Maybe I'm the odd one out that uses my real name on the Internet and generally try to behave/vote the same as I would in person, but it seems weird wanting a hybrid account that's private (votes), yet not private (comments).

@rimu is there a forum style ap implementation that can talk to lemmy communities (I'm assuming that piefed can) without voting?

Neat

Regarding the voting account having no name, does that mean it will be a random string of letters and numbers? I get that it will still be possible to discover vote manipulation or mass downvoting with that, but I suspect it would be more difficult to detect initially or without some deeper analysis, since it's harder to recognize or remember a random string compared to a human made username.

Cool solution!

This is excellent.

I'm curious about piefed now. Is it free of any explicit agenda?

So I've been thinking about this and I would go for a different approach.

Admins can set voting to be public or private on a server wide level.

When users vote, a key is created as the userid

The votes table is essentially: voteid, postid, userid, timestamp, salt, public

If the vote is private, userid is salt(userid, password)

And it's that simple.

Is it possible to double vote this way (once on each account)? On second thought, would it even matter? A malicious actor could have multiple accounts.