Due to difficulties making private voting a viable reality , we've been playing around with an alternative approach: public/private votes becomes "federated votes" where you can choose whether to send your vote off to other instances or whether it only counts locally and doesn't get federated.
There are obvious drawbacks to casting a vote that doesn't federate. But this avoids all the issues with which instances to trust (and who decides that) and avoids the distrust generated by all these sockpuppets with weird names running around and the need to explain in difficult technical detail why we're doing that, no it's not vote manipulation, don't ban / defederate us, etc etc
The video shows how the user interface could work. Basically there is a setting in your profile that determines whether your votes federate and an optional override you can use on a case-by-case basis.
There is an assumption here that people will generally choose one mode (public or private) and stick with that for most of their votes. The popup will only be used rarely so the extra clicks and the waiting involved won't be much of an issue.
Thoughts?
Would it make sense to somehow display the breakdown of pub/priv votes (or maybe local/fed votes) instead of just the totals then?
I could see this maybe being useful at a moderator or admin level to aid in moderation decisions, but I feel like the average user wouldn't really gain much from this information in exchange for a more complicated UI.
Just as an aside, in the dev chat we have been talking about this a lot and the UI has been one of the harder pieces. The main competing paradigm for the UI of this feature is to have two upvote and two downvote buttons (one set for public votes and another for local-only votes). Here is a mockup I made of the voting buttons for that: