It's a UX issue. If you make votes public they should be very clearly so, the way reactions are on Facebook, LinkedIn etc, and everyone would be fine with it. What's getting people's panties in a twist is that Lemmy superficially presents itself as having anonymous voting but the logs are tucked away behind some convoluted process that you have to just know about and only seems to work about half the time.
There's lots of cryptographic type approaches where the entity validating you is air-gapped from the entity certifying your age.
But if you don't trust them it's not hard to figure out a scratchcard system where for, say, £1 cash your local newsagent checks your ID and lets you pick a card that you scratch off to get a code that you can then use to obtain a cryptographic token online signed by a recognized CA. Neither the newsagent nor the card issuer have any way of tying you to that code, and if you don't like the idea of using the same token on multiple sites you can always buy more. Of course you'd also have the option of obtaining codes online, but there's something I think people would find reassuring about the existence of a visible physical gap.
There's plenty of ways age checking could be decoupled from identity checking, and I find it extremely suspicious that the proponents of these laws aren't promoting them.
The sad thing is that when it bursts it won't do it in a hilarious "billionaires all get shafted" way like it didn't any of the previous times. It's far more likely to take the form of the most powerful AIs suddenly only being accessible to the wealthy.
It would have been so easy for influencewatch to write that in a neutral way, but they couldn't help themselves from editorializing their very clear opinions into it, almost to the extent that it reads like an industry shill managed to get some edits in.
So basically they're fine with a HOA making all sorts of overreaching rules about keeping dogs as long as they don't have any basis in a brown people religion?
If I toss a coin 5 times and get 1H 4T, there's not a journal on the planet that would accept that as proof that it was a loaded coin, not to mention that the 5 on the list were specifically selected to prove a point (or were Clippy, Microsoft Bob, and Google Now girls as well?); and even if we did accept it as a rule (even though it isn't) it still doesn't follow that there was misogynist intent driving it; that's something you decided for yourselves.
which is really more a reflection on the people debating this
I'd throw that right back at you. People arguing in its support seem a lot more likely to look for secret misogynist motives in the person they're talking to in order to support their argument by ad hominem. It suggests an "our team versus their team" attitude where being on the correct team is more important than being fair or accurate.
Thanks for doing your best to highlight the important part in bold, but I still can't get over how misleading the headline is.