PieFed Meta

1031 readers

1 users here now

Discuss PieFed project direction, provide feedback, ask questions, suggest improvements, and engage in conversations related to the platform organization, policies, features, and community dynamics.

Wiki

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

Thoughts about private voting (piefed.ca)

submitted 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

10 comments fedilink hide all child comments

EDIT: Initial self-votes don't federate, so it seems this specific way doesn't work.

Am I missing something, or is Piefed's private voting kinda trivial to reverse engineer as long as every user by default upvotes every post and comment they make?

If you have a username and want to find the matching private voting ID, search through that user's posts and comments for an entry that only has one upvote. The vote cast on that entry will be the private voting ID.

If you have a private voting ID and want to find the matching username, search through all votes cast by the private voting ID to find a post/comment that only has one upvote. The user that posted that entry will be the original user.

If it really is this easy, it seems like it's sort of a false sense of security. On the other hand, if automatic upvoting of your own content could be disabled by default, that would prevent this from working.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago

Actually I’ve been thinking about this more and I’ve changed my mind. If someone really wants to figure out who voted, they probably still can. It just makes it a bit harder, not impossible.

Say user X makes a post in a dead community and gets a comment from user Y. Then user X upvotes that comment. Now the comment has only two votes. One is from Y themselves and the other is almost certainly from X. The chances would be even higher if X replies to that comment too.

Or imagine a situation where user X and user Z are arguing and start downvoting each other. Depending on how new the comments are and how active the post is, it’s still possible to connect the downvotes to their real accounts

Which is why I now think the only real way to make voting private is to generate a completely new voting account for every single vote. That would make it impossible to trace the votes back to the user across posts/comments.