Could we ask an admin to make a graph of all users on LW, with edges saying how many posts of one user another has upvoted, and all name labels removed except advancedatheist’s?
The numbers would have to be shuffled enough that no group of people could use public karma counts and their knowledge of whom they upvoted to gain too much info that ought to be anonymous.
Do we have a crypthography expert that can think of an algorithm that would work for that?
Or the admins could leave out the shuffling/delabeling and only examine the graph to see whether the situation is reasonable.
We could surely ask. Experience suggests that asking for such things is futile, I think mostly because the LW database is difficult to work with and the Tricyclists have little time (or enthusiasm, or something) for doing things to LW that require admin access.
Basically work that’s not done by asking an admin to do it but by somebody writing the necessary code (the system is open source) and then giving that code to be run against the database.
I seem to remember that there is a way to access the latest (simplified) database dump without admin access. Don’t remember where or whether it shows vote sources though.
Could we ask an admin to make a graph of all users on LW, with edges saying how many posts of one user another has upvoted, and all name labels removed except advancedatheist’s?
The numbers would have to be shuffled enough that no group of people could use public karma counts and their knowledge of whom they upvoted to gain too much info that ought to be anonymous.
Do we have a crypthography expert that can think of an algorithm that would work for that?
Or the admins could leave out the shuffling/delabeling and only examine the graph to see whether the situation is reasonable.
We could surely ask. Experience suggests that asking for such things is futile, I think mostly because the LW database is difficult to work with and the Tricyclists have little time (or enthusiasm, or something) for doing things to LW that require admin access.
That seems way too much work for a little bit of internet drama.
Basically work that’s not done by asking an admin to do it but by somebody writing the necessary code (the system is open source) and then giving that code to be run against the database.
I seem to remember that there is a way to access the latest (simplified) database dump without admin access. Don’t remember where or whether it shows vote sources though.