Opt-in makes it fairly pointless. But without opt-in, if you want to make it prohibitively difficult to write a script to find a member’s complete voting record with reasonable speed and near-total confidence:
I think you would need to make this only available above a certain karma threshold and with a significant time-delay before changes took effect, (so users can’t see a page with arbitrary weights on-demand). And only permit a few thresholds of weighting and require several users at each level (a single user with a fractional weight has no privacy).
Then someone can just weight sockpuppets who have no votes, or members who weren’t active during the time period you’re interested in, or …
And if there’s a way of getting around that, two users collaborating (or one user who’s posted a rationality quote with a sockpuppet) can still blow this out of the water.
And all this makes the feature even uglier than it was before.
As to ugly: this inferential gap is probably larger than I care to bridge.
Okay, you just nerd sniped me.
Opt-in makes it fairly pointless. But without opt-in, if you want to make it prohibitively difficult to write a script to find a member’s complete voting record with reasonable speed and near-total confidence:
I think you would need to make this only available above a certain karma threshold and with a significant time-delay before changes took effect, (so users can’t see a page with arbitrary weights on-demand). And only permit a few thresholds of weighting and require several users at each level (a single user with a fractional weight has no privacy).
Then someone can just weight sockpuppets who have no votes, or members who weren’t active during the time period you’re interested in, or …
And if there’s a way of getting around that, two users collaborating (or one user who’s posted a rationality quote with a sockpuppet) can still blow this out of the water.
And all this makes the feature even uglier than it was before.
As to ugly: this inferential gap is probably larger than I care to bridge.