If a website could be sure none of their users are malicious/bots and all of the users are perfectly rational and virtuous then public or private voting wouldn't matter either way. That being nearly impossible, why not a reputation based system like Stack Exchange? Only when an account meets certain requirements they can vote.

To boot, on the website tweakers.net one can actually vote -1, …, +3.

+3: “Spotlight comments are of such high quality and substantive value that they clearly stand out above the rest”
+2: “Informative and interesting comments that are a useful addition to the discussion in an on-topic thread or the information in the article”
+1: “Nice on-topic responses with knowledge that is common knowledge”
+0: “Comments that do not contain a relevant contribution, but are posted with good intentions”
-1: “Flamebaits, trolls, misplaced jokes, unnecessarily hurtful comments and other comments that violate our terms and conditions or house rules”

[Posted this comment on GitHub.]

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 weeks ago (3 children)

Any implementation is of course free to use a reputation system, but it seems hard to implement. You don't necessarily know all the votes a remote user has received. Say you get a vote to a post from a user who you've never heard about before. But actually this user is a well-respected member of their own instance and has been on that instance for years. Meanwhile, your instance believes this is an inactive spammer or new account or something.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Couldn't you have the main instance take care of it? I don't exactly know how activitypub handles votes but if they're reported back to the users home instance it could be calculated there.

For example if I had a reputation of 12 and I posted on a different instance and got enough votes to get 1 extra reputation those votes would be reported back to my instance which would update my rep accordingly.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

But how would I, an external instance, know your true reputation? Would I need to ask your home instance and just trust that? So when I ask "what level of trust should I put in this user", a malicious instance could just say "a million reputation points" and I just need to trust that? I don't see how this is going to work.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 weeks ago

Yeah that's fair, but without some form of centralization I don't see how you establish trust. Unless you have every instance scan every users history but that would be pretty inefficient

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