this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2023
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PSA: Lemmy votes can be manipulated (feddit.nl)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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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.

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[–] [email protected] 365 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (52 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago

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.

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