while true voting privacy would be great to achieve, as long as votes have meaning there need to be methods for tracking and dealing with abuse of them. if you achieve true vote privacy, there is no way to stop someone from creating 100 alt accounts to just downvote everything that person doesn’t like, including automatically voting on new content by selected users, without anyone being able to stop them. 100 downvotes are easily enough to bury new content and ensure it won’t reach the popular feeds where it’s more likely to gain more votes.
we have already removed private votes from piefed.world and i know that there is at least one other instance considering the same. it might be tolerable when you’re on the trusted instances list of a piefed instance and still see the original voters, but this also means that instances will have to start negotiating with other instances whether they will be marked as trusted by them. i know there is at least one admin already looking into options for flat out rejecting piefed’s “private” votes and just dropping them when they federate to them, stopping them from impacting any ranking on their instance or communities hosted on their instance.
nothing, but at least they can be identified and taken down. it hasn’t been too long ago that i banned 346 accounts involved in such a scheme, and if these accounts had been using piefed’s private voting, they would have been much harder to identify and separate from real users. as a result, this likely have had a much higher chance for false positives catching real users. activity beyond votes alone is very useful to isolate these abusive accounts. for example, a real account will frequently have a range of legitimate comments and those won’t just look like LLM garbage posting. there can also be other patterns, like similar/same usernames across instances. there was another case not that long ago where I banned around 80 accounts using the same name on many different instances, one per instance, to boost votes on one of those accounts.
there is no easy way to prevent people from creating a bunch of alts. there are various options that can be done to detect creation of multiple accounts, and piefed also has some features to help detecting with that, but there is only so much you can do without this also becoming a privacy nightmare with device fingerprinting etc. it’s not without reason that a lot of larger services with community functionality will prompt you to attach a phone number and/or using invasive fingerprinting measures to prevent people from creating a bunch of accounts or evading bans.