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.
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Classic forums still exist.
Voting does allow the cream to rise to the top, which is why reddit was much better than a forum.
Honestly, I think part of the problem is that companies don't have an incentive to fight bots or spam: higher numbers of users and engagement make them look better to investors and advertisers.
I don't think it's that difficult of a problem to solve. It should be quite possible to detect patterns between real users and bots.
We will see how the fediverse handles it.