Nothing is stopping a single individual from controlling 100 accounts on Lemmy to upvote and downvote whatever they want

3volver@lemmy.world to Showerthoughts@lemmy.world – -31 points –
34

I hate to break this to you, but there's only 43 people on lemmy at all. We're all just pretending to be everyone, including you.

You aren't you at all, you're a constructed personality inside someone's mind with a lifetime of false memories and a thin veneer of "free will" to give you the illusion of being a real person.

Instance admins can easily see who downvoted or upvoted what tho.

That's one reason I love that there is no "karma" score on Lemmee. There's less incentive to recycle old memes, shill for upvotes, etc. But yeah for propaganda purposes, it can totally be done, probably is being done right now.

Who pays attention to votes?

On reddit, it was obvious that people would read the headline then check out the top comment to find out what their opinion of the headline should be.

How do I know you're not a bot sent here by Steve Huffman to sow discord and create chaos on Lemmy because he's a small petty man?

Hmm? 🧐

That is, indeed, my entire point. Thank you for reinforcing it.

Sure. But votes aren't private or anonymous. Anyone on Kbin can see a list of every account that upvoted something, so it's easy to spot.

It's only a matter of time before someone writes a third party client that allows Lemmy users to do this as well.

Lemmy! The place where everything is made up, and the points don't matter!

I mean sure. It's probably done in some extend. But on most posts it's just not worth the trouble setting up a whole bot network, just because you don't like to post of 3volver. And you could build a similar bot network for pretty much every other social media platform, so it's not realy worth to invest that much time in altering the upvotes of a lemmy post. Lemmy beeing a network most people never even heard about.

I've noticed a few people doing it but they only seem to use like 4 accounts each. Usually people spamming/promoting a blog.

The average person has to manually make all the accounts, switch between them, find the post and vote on it. Thats a lot of effort for one additional vote. If you realy want to have an effect you have to build a botnet and thats a lot of work to annoy some people.

My guess is probably what's happening with these 4-account people is they have them all open at the same time in different browsers, and since they only use them to upvote one account's post submissions they just have to follow that account.

Most lemmy servers now have application processes and check for IPs being the same to prevent attacks afaik. When I helped delete spam posts the large majority was from fringe lemmy servers, none from the big ones.

You can still open up one accound on every server but it takes so much time that it makes no sense imo.

The lack of meaningful proof that it's not the case, bring on the consistent downvotes.

That's not how it works. If you claim something and want it to be validated, you need proof.

You don't randomly claim things and get other people to disprove you

They made the mistake of downvoting me too many times too quickly.

Votes on this comment:

  1. Came from 14 different instances - many of them major. Of those instances, the instance with the most votes contributed was lemmy.world (i.e. your own instance), from which my instance has seen 14 votes for that comment.
  2. Of the voters, I looked at the distribution of the person IDs assigned on my instance, which approximately represents the order they were seen by my instance (e.g. they voted on or interacted with another comment). If there was vote manipulation, I'd expect to see lots of IDs close together. However, there are not runs of IDs that are close together. To avoid this when manipulating votes, they'd need to have planned in advance, and made accounts and used them individually over time before finally deploying them to downvote you.

If there are instances that are a significant source of vote manipulation, and the local admins are unwilling to address it, there are options available to instance admins like defederation.

However - in the case of your comments, there is no meaningful evidence of vote manipulation.