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> Communities can elect and impeach their own mods by voting. If these are public communities that anyone can join pseudonymously (are they?) how does Aether p
by tlrobinson 8y ago
> Communities can elect and impeach their own mods by voting.
If these are public communities that anyone can join pseudonymously (are they?) how does Aether prevent Sybil attacks, where a malicious actor joins a community using multiple identities and votes themselves into power?
Also, spam?
- tomsmeding 8y agoDoes any existing kind of social network prevent that kind of attack? I don't believe so, and I'd think that's pretty difficult to accomplish. Aether does attempt to make this nontrivial, I believe, by requiring proof-of-work before posting things. I don't know, but possibly that proof-of-work also applies for impeachment votes (I hope it does!). Then depending on how hard that proof-of-work requirement is and how many people are already in the community, performing such an attack would become harder.
- cslarson 8y agoReddit is experimenting with sybil-resistent voting on a sub I moderate (r/ethtrader). In fact there is a vote[0] going on to retain me as the first moderator. The sybil-resistence comes from weighting polls with community points (on our sub we call them donuts - don't ask). Donuts are intended to represent contribution to the community so derive from sub specific karma, being a mod, etc. It's still an experiment but I think it's going well so far. [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/ethtrader/comments/9tm60s/governance_poll_i_am_first_moderator_at_your/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ethtrader/comments/9tm60s/governanc...
- um_ya 8y agoReddit's way of doing it works pretty well. You create your own community with your own rules, then people join it if they like the way things are run. Only downside to Reddit is the subreddit name squating.
- benhylau 8y agoMy understanding is that any participant action requires proof-of-work. Social networks like Secure Scuttlebutt prevents this type of attack by syncing only data within social trust circles. So spammers and bots can vote up each other all they want, but their actions will not be visible outside of their little island unless someone explicitly "friends" one of them. Aether, being a global view of unpartitioned data, has a more difficult time tackling this type of attack, and its proof-of-work minting of user actions seem like a reasonable approach.
- tlrobinson 8y agoIt’s definitely not a solved problem, which is why I was curious if Aether had any interesting solutions.
- rolleiflex 8y agoFor both of your questions, the answer is proof of work. For Sybils, that’s something I’ve considered. I’m thinking of making voting eligibility a trailing indicator where it tracks past activity to be considered a ‘citizen’ of that community, and allowing the mod team to temporaily lock down the community if they see such a thing happening.
- natch 8y agoWhat are your thoughts about the phenomenon called tyranny of the majority?
- hannasanarion 8y agoTyranny of the minority is worse
- natch 8y agoHah. Perhaps. But that doesn't mean we should accept either.
- blackbrokkoli 8y agoHow to prevent that tho? Everything seems to be at the risk of either the first or the second...
- natch 8y agoGood question. The framers of the US Constitution attempted to do it with a system of checks and balances... which works to a certain extent, but not perfectly. Point is just because it’s hard, that’s no reason to give up trying.
- hannasanarion 8y agoThe framers put in protections against tyranny of the minority, yes. But it's not the electoral college (which Madison and Hamilton tried to get rid of after they saw how it behaved) or fptp voting, or minority rule. You don't protect against tyranny of the majority by allowing minorities to dictate policy, that's just regular tyranny. You protect against majorities by requiring supermajorities for all the most important functions of government: constitutional change, impeachment, and censure.