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.
What the fuck happened to the internet? What happened to “never share your real name or any identifying information on the internet”?
Like Equifax? Excuse me if I am a little skeptical of “trusted” organizations handling my data.
I literally addressed this. My point is that we’d need to give personal identifying information to be 100% sure, so the best way at the moment would instead be to just verify humanness as best as possible (e.g. better captcha, AI/chatgpt response detection, etc.) and shift the account sign up to the authority’s side, accepting <100% unique individuals making accounts and prevent bots in other ways.
Also “trusted organizations handling your data” is exactly how 99% of the modern internet works. Rarely if ever do we give thought to the fact that companies like Verisign exist, nor that people regularly give credit card information to websites. At the same time, companies and corporations arent just some random schmuck spinning up their own authentication service