Ugly? Customization strikes me as functional and stylish. The privacy implications would be real, but there should be simple ways to mitigate, but not entirely eliminate the issue. People could opt in to allow themselves to be weighted, and maybe there should be a minimum number of non zero weights required.
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.
Ugly? Customization strikes me as functional and stylish. The privacy implications would be real, but there should be simple ways to mitigate, but not entirely eliminate the issue. People could opt in to allow themselves to be weighted, and maybe there should be a minimum number of non zero weights required.
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.