The best part of the fediverse is that anyone can run their own server. The downside of this is that anyone can easily create hordes of fake accounts, as I will now demonstrate.
Fighting fake accounts is hard and most implementations do not currently have an effective way of filtering out fake accounts. I’m sure that the developers will step in if this becomes a bigger problem. Until then, remember that votes are just a number.
This was a problem on reddit too. Anyone could create accounts - heck, I had 8 accounts:
one main, one alt, one “professional” (linked publicly on my website), and five for my bots (whose accounts were optimistically created, but were never properly run). I had all 8 accounts signed in on my third-party app and I could easily manipulate votes on the posts I posted.
I feel like this is what happened when you’d see posts with hundreds / thousands of upvotes but had only 20-ish comments.
There needs to be a better way to solve this, but I’m unsure if we truly can solve this. Botnets are a problem across all social media (my undergrad thesis many years ago was detecting botnets on Reddit using Graph Neural Networks).
Fwiw, I have only one Lemmy account.
On Reddit there were literally bot armies by which thousands of votes could be instantly implemented. It will become a problem if votes have any actual effect.
It’s fine if they’re only there as an indicator, but if the votes are what determine popularity, prioritize visibility, it will become a total shitshow at some point. And it will be rapid. So yeah, better to have a defense system in place asap.
Nah it’s the same here in Lemmy. It’s because the algorithm only accounts for votes and not for user engagement.
Yeah votes are the worst metric to measure anything because of bot voters.
I always had 3 or 4 reddit accounts in use at once. One for commenting, one for porn, one for discussing drugs and one for pics that could be linked back to me (of my car for example) I also made a new commenting account like once a year so that if someone recognized me they wouldn’t be able to find every comment I’ve ever written.
On lemmy I have just two now (other is for porn) but I’m probably going to make one or two more at some point
I have about 20 reddit accounts… I created/ switched account every few months when I used reddit
If you and several other accounts all upvoted each other from the same IP address, you’ll get a warning from reddit. If my wife ever found any of my comments in the wild, she would upvoted them. The third time she did it, we both got a warning about manipulating votes. They threatened to ban both of our accounts if we did it again.
But here, no one is going to check that.
I think the best solution there is so far is to require captcha for every upvote but that’d lead to poor user experience. I guess it’s the cost benefit of user experience degrading through fake upvotes vs through requiring captcha.
If any instance ever requires a captcha for something as trivial as an upvote, I’ll simply stop upvoting on that instance.
Yes that’s what I meant by degrading user experience
It wouldn’t stop bots because they would just use any instance without the captcha
I could see this being useful on a per community basis. Or something that a moderator could turn on and off.
For example on a political or news community during an election. It might be worth while to turn captcha on.
May I ask how do you format your text? My format bar has disappeared from wefwef.
I don’t use wefwef, I use jerboa for android.
**bold**
*italics*
> quote
`code`
# heading
- list
Ah ok. Yeah I thought the markdown was the same as reddit being markdown but it used to have a toolbar.
Thanks for response.
Also I’ve wondered why don’t they have an underline markdown.
Fun fact: old reddit used to use one of the header functions as an underline. I think it was 5x # that did it. However, this was an unofficial implementation of markdown, and it was discarded with new reddit. Also, being a header function you could only apply it to an entire line or paragraph, rather than individual words.
There’s no chance this works. Reddit surely does a simple IP check.
I had one main account but also a couple for using when I didn’t want to mix my “private” life up with other things. I don’t even know if it’s not allowed in the TOS?
Anyway, I stupidly made a Valmond account on several Lemmy instances before I got the hang of it, and when (if!) my server will one day function I’ll make an account there so …
I guess it might be like in the old forum days, you have a respectable account and another if you wanted to ask a stupid question etc. admin would see (if they cared) but not the ordinary users.
Reddit will definitely send you PM’s for vote manipulation
I would think that they need to set a somewhat permissive threshold to avoid too many false positives due to people sharing a network. For example, a professor may share a reddit post in a class with 600 students with their laptops connected to the same WiFi. Or several people sharing an airport’s WiFi could be looking at /r/all and upvoting the top posts.
I think 8 accounts liking the same post every few days wouldn’t be enough to trigger an alarm. But maybe it is, I haven’t tried this.
I don’t know how you got away with that to be honest. Reddit has fairly good protection from that behaviour. If you up vote something from the same IP with different accounts reasonably close together there’s a warning. Do it again there’s a ban.
I did it two or three times with 3-5 accounts (never all 8). I also used to ask my friends (N=~8) to upvote stuff too (yes, I was pathetic) and I wasn’t warned/banned. This was five-six years ago.