You seem very strongly opposed to any type of solution to the problem. I’m not sure why, but hey, you are entitled to your opinion.
I think it is a problem that a large percentage of the validators are operated by a small group of entities. This poses a serious security risk and a stability risk. Just today we see Kusama having issues because there are a significant number of operators that are not maintaining their validators and they either are running old code or have not set beefy keys (which were implemented months ago). The Jaco nodes are among the ones on the “naughty” list.
I think giving users of the dashboard an option to exclude duplicates would be a valuable addition. I don’t think it’s something that is going to be so impactful that validators are going try to cheat a single option on one staking dashboard. If they do, I have confidence they will be discovered and called out for it.
I also think giving users the option to see the location of the validators and chose a geographically diverse set is a good idea. Your argument that operators can simply rent a server in a faraway location is just proof that this is a good idea – if they do so that will increase the geographic diversity of the validators which is the goal. I operate 3 validators (2 KSM and 1 DOT), and all 3 are in different locations. No datacenter outage will take out all 3 of my validators at the same time, because they are not in the same datacenter. Nominators should want a diverse set themselves, to ensure they can still earn rewards if a datacenter goes offline.
Another potential idea would be to add a 1KV icon next to validators that are part of 1KV. I don’t think they should be explicitly promoted over others, but there status should be visible for those who are interested.
There’s a community page on the dashboard which, according to ross, validators can add themselves to, but despite my asking (both in this thread and privately), no instructions have been provided on how to do so. Other places have files in a github repo so a pull request can be submitted. I see there is a github repo for the dashboard, but if there is a file there to add ourselves to, I have not found it. If this is really meant to be representative of the community, there should be public information on how validator operators can join. Simply providing that information publicly would be yet another simple way to improve the dashboard.
Generally any time you are providing a filtering service like the staking dashboard, more ways to filter / select is better, not worse.