PSA: Lemmy votes can be manipulated

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.

bloodfart ,

Get rid of votes. They suck.

popemichael ,
@popemichael@lemmy.world avatar

You can buy 700 votes anonymously on reddit for really cheap

I don't see that it's a big deal, really. It's the same as it ever was.

Valmond ,

Over a houndred dollars for 700 upvotes O_o

I wouldn't exactly call that cheap 🤑

On the other hand, ten or twenty quick downvotes on an early answer could swing things I guess ...

PetrichorBias ,

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.

impulse ,

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.

simple ,
@simple@lemmy.world avatar

Reddit had ways to automatically catch people trying to manipulate votes though, at least the obvious ones. A friend of mine posted a reddit link for everyone to upvote on our group and got temporarily suspended for vote manipulation like an hour later. I don't know if something like that can be implemented in the Fediverse but some people on github suggested a way for instances to share to other instances how trusted/distrusted a user or instance is.

cynar ,

An automated trust rating will be critical for Lemmy, longer term. It's the same arms race as email has to fight. There should be a linked trust system of both instances and users. The instance 'vouches' for the users trust score. However, if other instances collectively disagree, then the trust score of the instance is also hit. Other instances can then use this information to judge how much to allow from users in that instance.

fmstrat ,

This will be very difficult. With Lemmy being open source (which is good), bot maker's can just avoid the pitfalls they see in the system (which is bad).

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • random
  • fediverse@lemmy.ml
  • test
  • worldmews
  • mews
  • All magazines
    •