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.
I was thinking of this too but then you need to keep track of who’s allowed to vote and that’s weird thing to federate even conceptually.
Something along similar lines is how they do it on Slashdot where users are randomly assigned limited number of points to be used for voting which makes them more precious in general. Tildes is also interesting in that regard because while there are no downvotes there, trusted users can apply labels that serve as something between a reason for downvote and a report. For example comment can be tagged as „noise” for not bringing anything to discussion which automatically ranks it below other comments but not removes it entirely. This prevents jokes being the top reply which is nice. Nothing against jokes but it depends on what kind of content you want others too see on your platform.