I have seen many a democratic initiative ruined by trolls, bot accounts, duplicate accounts, and assholes. The best way to ensure that democracy doesn’t spiral into Haiti is to allow only financial contributors of $5 or more to vote (once the boss man has his contributions system up and running). You want to help build this community? OK, then put your money where your mouth is. To be clear, it should still be one vote per person, whether you donate $5 or $500.
True, 5 wouldn’t do anything, but I can write a Python script in a few minutes that would keep creating alts as fast as the server would allow for weeks. Hundreds of thousands of users. Then I can single-handedly affect the outcome of any poll.
It wouldn’t take too much more automation to have them generate realistic looking comments using AI so they appear to be active users. Actually, how can you tell that I’m a real person? Maybe I’m a bot that can produce realistic looking conversation. :P
Electronic voting is a difficult thing to do in a way that is secure and accurate. I do think the idea of having a say in how the server works is a great idea. But it’s one that is tricky to implement correctly.
I thought the captcha was supposed to make automatically created accounts much harder. Do you have a way past that?
From my experience with AI, so far, just checking that you understand the concept of now and how it relates to past and future dates would be a good test.
Yeah, the implementation won’t be easy or perfect, but we should still aim to make it better.
Captcha solving services exist. At worse you’re essentially paying low wage workers to solve captcha for you. There are some AI image processing that can solve some captcha but their accuracy can vary.
In the end it boils down to making the cost as high as possible for spammers and also reducing the benefit of having a spam account by rapidly detecting and removing them.
It’s a hard problem to solve even for companies with massive resources.