Algorithmic patents amount to patenting maths which, by very longstanding precedence, is not a thing, for good reason.

You absolutely can patent “math” (well, more like physics) IRL. What matters though is that the invention actually has to be novel and non-obvious, and IMO it should also be harder to patent if it’s in a segment like software where costs of development, iteration and “research” are generally extremely cheap. Like, it should have a way higher bar for the “novelness”.

And I would not allow any kind of software design patent (use copyright or trademark to protect that).

…and that’s how it still works.

Considering those scanners usually register as keyboards and just do a dumb input “typing” it shouldn’t even be hard, lol.

The worst part would probably be picking a barcode scheme where the inputs make sense…

Also, this isn’t even compatible with copyright law in some countries. I.e here you can’t give up authorship at all; you can only grant an irrevocable, perpetual license (that might even prohibit you from distribution yourself and such) but you’ll always be able to say “I made this” no matter what their license says.

PayPal did their due diligence and then unfroze the account. Completely normal.

Sorry, no, it’s not “completely normal” to freeze an account for weeks without any recourse or communication and then be like “all good I guess”.

You could easily break a company doing just that. It really fucking sucks and should never happen.

That’s what PieFed changes though. You can still track how someone votes, but you can’t tie it to a specific profile (without doing some extra analysis and even then you can’t be completely sure).

Or, with my suggestion, you could track how that specific account votes, but it would be easy to obfuscate who exactly it is and (hopefully) impossible to track to the user’s other identities.

They ask you for all sorts of personal information, which I guess is industry standard, but it’s a third party service

The reason is money laundering / tax evasion laws. There is not really a way to buy crypto anonymously without breaking laws.

To be fair, why not just drop the other provider and use Proton? Should be cheaper that way. I also didn’t ask for any of this, and use email almost exclusively, but the VPN has come in handy a few times.

Do you have a tl;d…l?

I think this approach kinda fixes that issue though, no? You can use it the way it is now, and others can be anonymous.

I mean it would be also nice if you could log into multiple accounts and easily switch between them for each vote and comment, but this is also good, IMO.

Looks like it’s kinda hard to spin up a piefed bot. Not impossible, but it’s a bitch without an API.

What you would actually want to do if you want to bot is take one of the existing apps and modify it to make spamming easy.

Either way, I want to be able to point to their behavior - without the extra step of having to de-anonymize their activity - and tell them to chill the fuck out or get the fuck out. Out means out. Totally and forever.

I can see why you would want that, but my question is is that such a big deal compared to people being harassed for their voting? I don’t think user privacy should be violated - especially en masse / by default just because of some (in my opinion fairly minor) moderation concerns.

And if they are a dick overall, then you will figure it out anyway, ban their “main” account and that will prevent them from voting, too (unless the instance is malicious, but then a malicious instance can do much more harm in general).

It’s very easy to find my IRL identity, and even my online pseudonym (well, both of them) have so much stuff tied to them that they are effectively my real identities. They are very much public, and definitely not anonymous.

Mass vote manipulation should still be easy to spot. It’ll only be hard to check whether the account voting is a real person.

Thanks for being so upfront about how you run your instance. I think it’s disingenuous when people claim that there is “no agenda” or “no moderation” or whatever, because there is always some - even if unintended - just by the pure nature of people running it. So being explicit and opinionated about it is great.

…and it still doesn’t solve the issue that literally anyone can run their own instance and just capture the data.

On one end, if it’s my instance and I want to ban a user, I want the whole fucking user banned – not just remove their ability to vote anonymously.

I mean, is that truly the case? If a user only engages in vote manipulation, but otherwise they have insightful comments/posts, is it really that big of a deal that you will ban only their option to vote?

It could be mitigated further by having a different Actor per community you engage in, but that is definitely a bigger change in how voting works currently, and might have issues detecting vote brigading.

When you comment you make a conscious decision to put your opinion out there and sign it with your “name” (or alternatively you switch to a “burner” account and do it pseudonymously).

But when you vote for stuff it’s often without much thinking, and it’s private on pretty much every other platform. Where it isn’t it’s usually blatantly obvious that that is the case.

What difference does it make that votes can be viewed, other than for transparency during discussion?

There are many reasons that have been stated time and time again; one is simply that people may wish to stay anonymous when supporting certain opinions.

To me it feels like comments are what you can actually stand behind publicly, while votes also show what you think privately. And not everyone is willing to stand behind all of their opinions publicly, often for fear of backlash or harassment.

This doesn’t solve it. I can still just make multiple accounts and vote multiple times.

I mean yeah, but you could already do that now. The point is to not make it worse, and to not allow malicious instances to vote as if they were other people.

I guess that’s true. Then you could just ask the instance admins to check their users’ voting patterns / deanonymize them / whatever, and if they don’t comply defederate them.