I don’t think you become the best tech CEO in the world by having a healthy approach to work. He is just wired differently, some people are just all about work.

It’s just a research paper, not a product. It’s about discovering and learning new possible methods and applications.

You could always ask someone to vouch for you. It could also be that you have open communities and closed communities. So you would build up trust in an open community before being trusted by someone to be allowed to interact with the closed communities. Open communities could be communities less interesting/harder for the bots to spam and closed communities could be the high risk ones, such as news and politics.

Would this greatly reduce the user friendliness of the site? Yes. But it would be an option if bots turn into a serious problem.

I haven’t really thought through the details and I’m not sure how well it would work for a decentralised network though. Would each instance run their own trust tree, or would trusted instances share a single trust database 🤷‍♂️

A chain/tree of trust. If a particular parent node has trusted a lot of users that proves to be malicious bots, you break the chain of trust by removing the parent node. Orphaned real users would then need to find a new account that is willing to trust them, while the bots are left out hanging.

Not sure how well it would work on federated platforms though.

It’s not leak when it’s an intended and documented feature…

They are probably the most complex machines ever created by humanity though, and requires expertise across the whole world to build. Even if they had blueprints, it would take years just to get the manufacturing right.

Admins need a way to track votes to detect abuse/bots though. And anyone can be an admin if they set up an instance, so votes will still be public.

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.

I guess I’m just of the opinion that if someone has that concern, they should rethink how they use social platforms and maybe look into creating a more anonymous profile that suits their need better.

But now we are just down to differing opinions, which is all fine to have, I won’t claim my thoughts are the best one.

I have felt the want to have a more anonymous profile from time to time since being an admin means I need to avoid controversial topics, but it isn’t any more difficult than simply not engaging with it.

I’m surprised most people are against public votes. Most people already seem to have an anonymous account via some weird username not connected to their real identity already. What difference does it make that votes can be viewed, other than for transparency during discussion?

Maybe I’m the odd one out that uses my real name on the Internet and generally try to behave/vote the same as I would in person, but it seems weird wanting a hybrid account that’s private (votes), yet not private (comments).