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PSA: Lemmy votes can be manipulated
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this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2023
1851 points (97.5% liked)
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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.
I see what you mean, but there's also a large number of lurkers, who will only vote but never comment.
I don't think it's unfeasible to have a small number of comments on a highly upvoted post.
If it's a meme or shitpost there isn't anything to talk about