More Privacy Options

Gatsha

Gatsha

Really Experienced
I saw this brought up in another thread and since it wasn't the primary topic there, I'd thought I'd spin off and see if there was interest:

Right now, I think the only privacy setting you can enable on chyoa main site is to hide your online status. It seems some users are hesitant to use features that display in your personal activity queue because anyone can see them. Your likes form a kind of public personal ledger that can tell others what you were reading and at what time.

Would it be possible and agreeable to add more privacy customization?

To keep it simple and votable, I'd expect a settings toggle for users to hide their activity queue from others period should be doable?

If I'm missing anything, please advise. Thanks!
 
My only concern is vote manipulation. "Likes" push stories to the top of the search results and the frontpage Top 10 list. As long as there's some way to validate it, I think its a good idea.
 
Dissonant Soundtrack said:
My only concern is vote manipulation. "Likes" push stories to the top of the search results and the frontpage Top 10 list. As long as there's some way to validate it, I think its a good idea.
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Again, I may be confused, but I don't understand the concern. I'm not sure how being able to see a user's activity queue has anything to do with juicing likes.

For the purposes of this, I'll define "like juicing" as a process by which a story can gain likes other than separate individual users legitimately clicking the like button, for the purpose of gaining numbers.

Right now, a single user can only like a single chapter once. Even if a user was to make multiple accounts and was to go through liking their own chapters in quick succession without reading them (such that their activity log might reveal they'd liked multiple chapters in very quick succession, calling it into question)...

First, I'd ask if moderators actually currently screen such activity to prevent "like juicing."

Second, it would seem quite possible to make private queues visible to mods to get around this problem; unless there is evidence of specifically non-mod user reporting having curtailed this in the past.

Third, I don't think a quick succession of likes is definitive proof of "like juicing."

Am I misunderstanding why having an activity queue helps prevent abuse?
 
Gatsha said:
First, I'd ask if moderators actually currently screen such activity to prevent "like juicing."
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Not that I'm aware of.

Gatsha said:
Second, it would seem quite possible to make private queues visible to mods to get around this problem; unless there is evidence of specifically non-mod user reporting having curtailed this in the past.
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Yes, this is already the case with the current privacy setting.

Gatsha said:
Am I misunderstanding why having an activity queue helps prevent abuse?
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The activity log might be used to identify a user as a spam bot, in which case they would be interacting with the site at an inhuman rate. That doesn't necessarily mean it needs to be public, though.
 
Gatsha said:
I'm not sure how being able to see a user's activity queue has anything to do with juicing likes.

For the purposes of this, I'll define "like juicing" as a process by which a story can gain likes other than separate individual users legitimately clicking the like button, for the purpose of gaining numbers.

Right now, a single user can only like a single chapter once. Even if a user was to make multiple accounts and was to go through liking their own chapters in quick succession without reading them (such that their activity log might reveal they'd liked multiple chapters in very quick succession, calling it into question)...
Click to expand...

The individual users' activity log would be a difficult place to find this, and I don't know that it would be revealing. Some people clearly read through an entire story and then go back and just bounce chapter to chapter hitting "Like" on each one. I've done that myself once I realized a story was going somewhere interesting.

What I'm thinking of is the main page News Feed, where it would be much easier to spot someone using bots to spam likes on a specific story.

First, I'd ask if moderators actually currently screen such activity to prevent "like juicing."

Second, it would seem quite possible to make private queues visible to mods to get around this problem; unless there is evidence of specifically non-mod user reporting having curtailed this in the past.
Click to expand...

The mods probably could uncover it if they were looking for it, but do they have the time? Content moderation is already a pretty huge responsibility, not to mention some of the tasks they have to handle by hand (deleting or renaming user accounts, for example).

My concern is really that I've seen electronic ballot stuffing in a lot of contexts, some of which with stupidly low stakes. A guy once spent $660 freakin US dollars to win a Twitter poll. https://billswire.usatoday.com/2019...ty-buffalo-bills-fans-donate-to-titans-cause/ Given that some folks on this site are using their contributions to advertise their own paid works or Patreon, I'm just thinking about bad incentives meeting opportunity. FWIW, I don't mind self-promotion as long as it's organic.

Am I overthinking this? Probably. I'm just raising my concern but I'm happy to be wrong.
 
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