sybil attack defense strategy in Loomio

Question: if a moderator was concerned about this, can't s/he use an offline process to verify identity before approving a user to join the group? If so, this would mitigate this issue when dealing with smaller groups.

Hi @jeandaniel. That's what I meant when I wrote:
"...Finally, given that Loomio has a built-in functionality that allows coordinators to make registering in a group invitation-only, there exist an option to “outsource” account verification to group coordinators. They can create (outside of Loomio) a policy according to which only people who send a payment will be able to register. Of course you would be risking loosing a potentially interesting revenue stream, because the coordinator could direct the payments to an account of her choosing...."

That one person could easily block the proposal from the 100 sock puppets.

...

...one person blocking can be enough to get around sock puppets...

What if it's 10,000 puppets, one per community, single-handedly blocking everything?

I think @alexanderzatko is onto something really important here; Sybil attacks are problematic in general, and combined with the (very important!) blocking functionality could be pretty devastating.

@elimisteve -- Each sock puppet (or any malicious user in general) who wants to block a proposal needs to provide a plausible rationale for the block, or people will just ignore it and proceed anyway. An "empty" block, with no explanation, is completely worthless and functionless, at least in the community that I work in most. And a block with a compelling reason attached should be considered, even if it was posted by a sock puppet, in my opinion.

@sirwumpus Thanks for the response.

...or people will just ignore it and proceed anyway

What does that mean, though? Does Loomio not have a notion of a proposal that passed? Does a single block not prevent this, Occupy-style?

Looks like I need to use more of Loomio's functionality :-).

The meaning of a block is defined by each group for themselves. So if someone was intentionally disrupting the process, and was not actually bringing up valid concerns, I'd assume the group would either ignore them or boot them out.

@elimisteve seems to be under the wrong impression about the meaning of "Block" that I was when I saw it the first time. IMHO Loomio needs to change (as fast as possible) the default label "Block" as well as the corresponding icon, because this will continue to be source of confusion for most people. Some will see it as a manifestation of "occupy-style" concept and others (majority) will look at it with disbelief, thinking that Loomio allows an individual to stop a voting process.

@alexanderzatko My group that I brought to loomio had a long discussion called "How we use block vs disagree", in which we came to an understanding that worked for our particular group. Several differing understandings were presented by different people to start with, each of which was reasonable in its own way.

So based on that experience, I can agree that new loomio users don't seem to all arrive with the same ideas of what a block means. But since the system is flexible enough for it to mean different things to different groups, I'm not certain that is a big problem.

Do you have a suggestion on what the word "Block" should be changed to, or what icon would be better than the current one?

An improvement would be welcome; I'm just not sure that any change would be as good of a compromise as what we have now. I wouldn't want to see the system change in a way that suits one group, only to make it less suitable for some other groups. Customizing these options on a per-group basis seems to me to be the best option, and I think I've seen that potential feature discussed before.

@sirwumpus
I just read about that potential feature here:

Making a Decision with Loomio 1.0

In Summary

Here’s the default set of decision options (we’ll be adding plugins for different styles of decision-making):

agree – I think this sounds good
abstain – I’m happy for the group to decide without me
disagree – I think we can do better
block – I have really serious concerns

This set of four options came directly from our experience of collective decision-making at Occupy. We’ve found this protocol to work well in all kinds of groups. There’s more nuance than a simple yes/no binary, but it’s simple enough to be really easy to grasp.

@alanna @alexanderzatko @sirwumpus Flexibility is great, but having the same icons mean different things on different pages sounds like a UX horror story, don't ya think?

There could be different icon sets, I suppose, and as long as there's not too many to memorize, then that could work...

I agree @elimisteve -- If we can't have consistency between groups (which I think we realistically can't, except for small sets of related groups) then distinctive icons and text would be a very good thing to aid understanding.

But that feature is drifting far from the topic of this conversation, so I suggest that it be discussed here:
https://www.loomio.org/d/tOWDImxb/customizing-yes-no-block-abstain-text

or voted up here: https://trello.com/c/KM1cupt1/62-customisable-labels-and-colours-for-4-voting-options-per-group

O:-)