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Lemmy vote aggregation idea (sopuli.xyz)

submitted 1 week ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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] 5 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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

Could you provide an example calculation? I'm not getting it. Do you want to map values from one range to another e.g [-1000,1000] to [-1,1]? Will each instance have its own mapping?

Also, computationally, I'm not sure how this is going to work iteratively. From what I understand, activitypub sends events either singular or batched to other servers e.g User X votes up, that's an event sent, User Y votes down, that's another event sent. If I'm not mistaken, lemmy doesn't store the events it receives so reconstituting a vote tally isn't possible.

I kinda get where you're coming from, but I'm not sure it's the right solution.

Anti Commercial-AI license

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago

To me the idea is more important than implementation details because those can be worked out in many different ways as you’ve noticed. If you know what is the goal then you can adjust if you see things not working out as intended.

The most basic approach would be to get positive/negative ratio and decide how much in the middle is still 0.