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.
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
Maybe you're right, but it just felt uncanny to see thousands of upvotes on a post with only a handful of comments. Maybe someone who active on the bot-detection subreddits can pitch in.
I agree completely. 3k upvotes on the front page with 12 comments just screams vote manipulation
True, but there were also a number of subs (thinking of the various meirl spin-offs, for example) that naturally had limited engagement compared to other subs. It wasn’t uncommon to see a post with like 2K upvotes and five comments, all of them remarking how little comments there actually were.
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.
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.
LLM bots has make this approach much less effective though. I can just leave my bots for a few months or a year to get reputation, automate them in a way that they are completely indistinguishable from a natural looking 200 users, making my opinion carry 200x the weight. Mostly for free. A person with money could do so much more.
It's the same game as email. An arms race between spam detection, and spam detector evasion. The goal isn't to get all the bots with it, but to clear out the low hanging fruit.
In your case, if another server noticed a large number of accounts working in lockstep, then it's fairly obvious bot-like behaviour. If their home server also noticed the pattern and reports it (lowers the users trust rating) then it wont be dinged harshly. If it reports all is fine, then it's also assumed the instance might be involved.
If you control the instance, then you can make it lie, but this downgrades the instance's score. If it's someone else's, then there is incentive not to become a bot farm, or at least be honest in how it reports to the rest.
This is basically what happens with email. It's FAR from perfect, but a lot better than nothing. I believe 99+% of all emails sent are spam. Almost all get blocked. The spammers have to work to get them through.
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).
I got suspended multiple times because my partner and daughter were also in our city's sub, and sometimes one of them would upvote my comments without realizing it was me. It got really fucking annoying, and of course there's no way to talk to a real person at reddit to prove we're different people. I'd appeal every time and they'd deny it every time. How reddit could have gotten so huge without realizing that multiple people can live in the same household is beyond me. In the end they both just stopped upvoting anything in the sub because it was too risky (for me).
That's such a hilariously bad metric for detecting a bot network too. It wouldn't even work to detect a real one, so all that policy ever did was annoy real users.
Hearing that, I wonder if they were using an IP address based system. That would cause real problems for people using a VPN, but it wouldn't surprise me.
RIP u/unidan
I miss everyone being Unidan
I got that message too when switching accounts to vote several times. They can probably see it's all coming from the same ip.
Nah it's the same here in Lemmy. It's because the algorithm only accounts for votes and not for user engagement.
Yeah votes are the worst metric to measure anything because of bot voters.
Yes, I feel like this is a moot point. If you want it to be "one human, one vote" then you need to use some form of government login (like id.me, which I've never gotten to work). Otherwise people will make alts and inflate/deflate the "real" count. I'm less concerned about "accurate points" and more concerned about stability, participation, and making this platform as inclusive as possible.
In my opinion, the biggest (and quite possibly most dangerous) problem is someone artificially pumping up their ideas. To all the users who sort by active / hot, this would be quite problematic.
I'd love to actually see some social media research groups actually consider how to detect and potentially eliminate this issue on Lemmy, considering Lemmy is quite new and is malleable at this point (compared to other social media). For example, if they think metric X may be a good idea to include in all metadata to increase chances of detection, then it may be possible to include this in the source code of posts / comments / activities.
I know a few professors and researchers who do research on social media and associated technologies, I'll go talk to them when they come to their office on Monday.
This also vaguely reminds me of some advanced networking topics. In mesh networks there is the possibility of rogue nodes causing havoc and different methods exist to reduce their influence or cut them out of the process.
!remindme - oh wait…
@remindme@mstdn.social 1 day
:)
@Lumidaub Ok, I will remind you on Monday Jul 10, 2023 at 9:36 AM PDT.
I have been thinking about this government id aspect too. But it's not coming to me.
Users sign up with govt ID, obtain a unique social media key that's used for all activities beyond the sign up. One key per person, but a person can have multiple accounts? You know, like that database primary key.
The relationship between the govt id and social media key needs to be in a zero knowledge encryption so that no one can corelate the real person with their online presence. THIS is the bummer.
These downvotes indicate that some of the assholes have now migrated.
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.
I always had 3 or 4 reddit accounts in use at once. One for commenting, one for porn, one for discussing drugs and one for pics that could be linked back to me (of my car for example) I also made a new commenting account like once a year so that if someone recognized me they wouldn't be able to find every comment I've ever written.
On lemmy I have just two now (other is for porn) but I'm probably going to make one or two more at some point
I have about 20 reddit accounts... I created/ switched account every few months when I used reddit
If you and several other accounts all upvoted each other from the same IP address, you'll get a warning from reddit. If my wife ever found any of my comments in the wild, she would upvoted them. The third time she did it, we both got a warning about manipulating votes. They threatened to ban both of our accounts if we did it again.
But here, no one is going to check that.
Congratulations on such a tough project.
And yes, as long as the API is accessible somebody will create bots. The alternative is far worse though
May I ask how do you format your text? My format bar has disappeared from wefwef.
I don't use wefwef, I use jerboa for android.
**bold**
*italics*
> quote
`code`
# heading
- list
Ah ok. Yeah I thought the markdown was the same as reddit being markdown but it used to have a toolbar.
Thanks for response.
Also I’ve wondered why don’t they have an underline markdown.
Fun fact: old reddit used to use one of the header functions as an underline. I think it was 5x # that did it. However, this was an unofficial implementation of markdown, and it was discarded with new reddit. Also, being a header function you could only apply it to an entire line or paragraph, rather than individual words.
I'd just make new usernames whenever I thought of one I thought was funny. I've only used this one on Lemmy (so far) but eventually I'll probably make a new one when I have one of those "Oh shit, that'd be a good username" moments.
You can change your display name on Lemmy to whatever you want whenever you want.
Oh neat! Thanks!
I think the best solution there is so far is to require captcha for every upvote but that’d lead to poor user experience. I guess it’s the cost benefit of user experience degrading through fake upvotes vs through requiring captcha.
If any instance ever requires a captcha for something as trivial as an upvote, I’ll simply stop upvoting on that instance.
Yes that’s what I meant by degrading user experience
It wouldn't stop bots because they would just use any instance without the captcha
I could see this being useful on a per community basis. Or something that a moderator could turn on and off.
For example on a political or news community during an election. It might be worth while to turn captcha on.
There's no chance this works. Reddit surely does a simple IP check.
I would think that they need to set a somewhat permissive threshold to avoid too many false positives due to people sharing a network. For example, a professor may share a reddit post in a class with 600 students with their laptops connected to the same WiFi. Or several people sharing an airport's WiFi could be looking at /r/all and upvoting the top posts.
I think 8 accounts liking the same post every few days wouldn't be enough to trigger an alarm. But maybe it is, I haven't tried this.
I had one main account but also a couple for using when I didn't want to mix my "private" life up with other things. I don't even know if it's not allowed in the TOS?
Anyway, I stupidly made a Valmond account on several Lemmy instances before I got the hang of it, and when (if!) my server will one day function I'll make an account there so ...
I guess it might be like in the old forum days, you have a respectable account and another if you wanted to ask a stupid question etc. admin would see (if they cared) but not the ordinary users.
Reddit will definitely send you PM's for vote manipulation
IMO the best way to solve it is to 'lower the stakes' - spread out between instances, avoid behaviors like buying any highly upvoted recommendation without due diligence etc. Basically, become 'un-advertiseable', or at least less so
I don't know how you got away with that to be honest. Reddit has fairly good protection from that behaviour. If you up vote something from the same IP with different accounts reasonably close together there's a warning. Do it again there's a ban.
I did it two or three times with 3-5 accounts (never all 8). I also used to ask my friends (N=~8) to upvote stuff too (yes, I was pathetic) and I wasn't warned/banned. This was five-six years ago.
I have like tens of accounts on reddit.
I’m curious what value you get from a bot? Were you using it to upvote your posts, or to crawl for things that you found interesting?
The latter. I was making bots to collect data (for the previously-mentioned thesis) and to make some form of utility bots whenever I had ideas.
I once had an idea to make a community-driven tagging bot to tag images (like hashtags). This would have been useful for graph building and just general information-lookup. Sadly, the idea never came to fruition.
Cool, thank you for clarifying!
The lack of karma helps some. There's no point in trying to rack up the most points for your account(s), which is a good thing. Why waste time on the lamest internet game when you can engage in conversation with folks on lemmy instead.
It can still be used to artificially pump up an idea. Or used to bury one.
This is the problem. All the algorithms are based on the upvote count. Bad actors will abuse this.
So maybe more weight should be put on comment count? Much harder to fake those.
That's where all the harm comes from
Agree. Farming karma is nothing compared to making a single individual polar-opinion APPEAR as though it is other’s (or most’s) polar-opinion. We know that other’s opinions are not our own, but they do influence our opinions. It’s pretty important that either 1) like numbers mean nothing, in which case hot/active/etc. are meaningless or 2) we work together to ensure trust in like numbers.
Maybe you move public perception of a product or political goal.
To push a narrative of some kind. Astroturfing basically.
Lack of karma is a fallacy. The default Lemmy UI doesn't display it but the karma system appears to be fully built.
The data to build it is there. Ftfy
Tallies are maintained in the db in real-time. No calculating needed
I just mean that the karma system ala Reddit did more than just keep track of it and display it afaik. The data is in the db but a fully done karma system it is not. I could be wrong.
Corporations could use it to push their ads to the top
This is near inevitable if this platform takes off.
Advertisers gonna advertise.
Just rip them in the comments and boycott their brand
Edit: or even meme them into the ground. I could start a parody account if I saw someone advertising. I could pretend I’m them and align myself with nazi values in satire ads hypothetically.
This is exactly why they wouldn't risk officially advertising here. Not enough control over the platform leads to too much risk to brand perception.
I was actually talking to someone that works in advertising and for big companies this is unlikely. Pepsi for example pays a lot for the guarntee that their product ads won't appear near posts they don't want them to. Since Lemmy advertising would only be through regular posts where they have no control over this, they likely wouldn't risk the potential detriment to brand perception.
Now this can change if the potential reach of Lemmy is big enough but that size will be different for each company.
Probably true. it's the agencies who are desperate and likely to be looking to chatGPT to outsource ad copy who are going to be looking to capitalize.
No community is really above being targeted, because the good campaigns done by people in the niche tend to be indistinguishable from good posts.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding karma, but Memmy appears to show the total upvotes I've gotten for comments and posts, isn't that basically karma?
I don't think other people can see it though. On Reddit bot accounts would rack up karma so that when they switch to posting spam it looks like they have a lot of karma and are someone who posts worthwhile things.
I’m using wefwef and can see what everyone score is on any given comment as well as their overall score when I go to their profile
Yeah I was wrong. I use Jerboa mostly.
same on Memmy for me
I can click on you and see the same stats for you... though the numbers seems too low when I eyeball it compared to your comments, but I'm thinking maybe it's just total points for a single lemmy server?
I guess I was wrong. I shouldn't have assumed. I'm using Jerboa.
EDIT I was wrong! Lemmy does have karma, even listed in the API, though for some reason it doesn't show this to you itself. So, those of us just using Lemmy directly have been under the mistaken idea that it didn't do it, and those using third party apps are seeing it: https://lemmy.world/post/1250922?scrollToComments=true
~~That's interesting, because on the Lemmy website, there is no total upvotes number visible. It only shows the total number of posts and total number of comments. It then shows the list of posts and comments, and you can see the scores for each, but there's no total. Memmy must be calculating this itself. This seems to be something third party app developers are adding which is not present in actual Lemmy itself, in order to try to replicate Reddit Karma somewhat.
As Lemmy works itself: On Reddit, in addition to your posts and comments having visible scores, your username also has an aggregate score, which Lemmy does not have. At least, when I go to your profile, I can see the scores for your posts and comments, but I cannot see any aggregate score for you as a user. That's what Reddit Karma is. I don't know what black magic formula Reddit calculates it from, as old Reddit and new Reddit show different Karma numbers for the same user, but whatever algorithm they use, it's an overall user score that Lemmy does not have (so far, at least). ~~
While the Lemmy UI doesn't expose the data is available via the API. That's how clients like Memmy are getting it.
Yep! I just saw this other post where I learned I was wrong. That's what I get for just using Lemmy itself. https://lemmy.world/post/1250922?scrollToComments=true
The lack of karma also makes it worse. Usually if I saw a discussion that felt kinda off I'd check the accounts age and karma. Made it easier to sniff out bots.
The karma though is what drove Reddit adoption to an extent. Gamification helps. It helped Reddit, it helped robinhood stocks app.
Maybe fediverse needs some gamification.
Or maybe not. Facebook and YouTube seem to be doing fine just using the line/unlike button.
In case anyone's wondering this is what we instance admins can see in the database. In this case it's an obvious example, but this can be used to detect patterns of vote manipulation.
“Shill” is a rather on-the-nose choice for a name to iterate with haha
I appreciate it, good for demonstration and just tickles my funny bone for some reason. I will be delighted if this user gets to 100,000 upvotes—one for every possible iteration of shill#####.
Oh cool 👀 What's the rest of that table? Is the
actor_idone column in like... anupvotestable or something?actor_id is just the full url of an user. It has the username at the end. That's why I have censored it.
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.
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 ...
For the companies who want a huge advantage over others, $100 is nothing in an advertising budget.
I have a small business and I do $1000 a week in advertising.
I don't know anything about advertising but what are you doing that costs $1000 a week? I am legitimately curious.
Advertising is incredibly expensive. I pay upwards to $1/click for one of my services targetting a specific group.
If you hate ads, use something like Ad Nauseum instead of UBlock origin. You'll cost companies hundreds of dollars a day.
I do use As Nauseum, I love it!
I run a digital currency investment group.
I can make 10-15k per day, so it's not a lot in the grand scheme of things
the only problem here is that 700 reddit upvotes is not "huge advantage over others". i honestly fail to see how someone could pay $100 for that. i'd consider $10 too much.
or do you spend your $1000 budget on 7000 reddit upvotes? :D
700 extra upvotes in the first couple hours on a medium sized hobby sub is an enormous amount and will give you great exposure to potentially tens of thousands of potential customers who won't just ignore it like some banner ad (since they'll think it's real content).
If you're an indie dev marketing game, it's cheap as shit. Shoving your post into the faces of thousands would very easily get you more than that in sales.
To me, the draw of Lemmy is that it's not the same as it ever was here. I don't know the internet before ads, this place is great!
Cause the problem, sell the solution. What a degenerate.
Web of trust is the solution. Show me vote totals that only count people I trust, 90% of people they trust, 81% of people they trust, etc. (0.9 multiplier should be configurable if possible!)
Your client has to compute the raw data, not the server or else it will just be your server manipulating what you see and think.
Love that type of solution.
I've been thinking about an admin that votes on example posts to define the policy, and then getting users scored against it, then using high scorers to represent user copies of the admins spirit of moderation, and then make systems that use that for automoderation.
e.g. I vote yes, no, yes. I then run the script that checks my users that have voted in all three, and the ones with the highest matching votes that i define(must be 100% matching to my votes) gets counted as "matching my spirit of moderation". If a spirit of moderation user downvotes or reports then it can be auto flagged into an admin console for me to then rapidly view instead of sifting through user complaints, and if things get critically spicy i can promote them to emergency mods, or automate their reports so that if a spirit user and a random user both report, it gets auto removed.
For each vote, read user post content and vote history and age
This should happen in the client and easily controllable by the user. As well as to investigate why one particular post or current was selected by the local content discovery algorithm. So you can quickly find fraudulent accounts and block them.
And this public, user led moderation actions then go on to inform the content discovery algorithm of other users until we have consensus user led content discovery and moderation.
And just like that we eliminate the need for shadowy humans of the moderator priesthood to play human spamfilter / human thought manipulator
This was a great feature of reddit enhancement suite.
The nice things about the Federated universe is that, yes, you can bulk create user accounts on your own instance - and that server can then be defederated by other servers when it becomes obvious that it's going to create problems.
It's not a perfect fix and as this post demonstrated, is only really effective after a problem has been identified. At least in terms of vote manipulation from across servers, it could act if it, say, detects that 99% of new upvotes are coming from a server created yesterday with 1 post, it could at least flag it for a human to review.
It actually seems like an interesting problem to solve. Instance runners have the sql database with all the voting record, finding manipulative instances seems a bit like a machine learning problem to me
There's an XKCD for that: https://xkcd.com/810/
One other thing is that you can bulk create your own instances, and that's a lot more effort to defederate. People could be creating those instances right now and just start using them after a year; at least they have incurred some costs during that..
I believe abuse management in openly federated systems (e.g. Lemmy, Mastodon, Matrix) is still an unsolved problem. I doubt good solutions will arrive before they become popular enough to attract commercial spammers.
Then they will just distribute their bots equally to other legit servers, and by that, defederation is not a viable solution anymore.
One other problem are real human troll farms
If they can do that, they could've done it on a traditional site anyway
"Legit" instances are able to moderate/control the spam coming from their users.
Reddit admins manipulated vote counts all the time.
Reddit also created fake users to post fake content... At least in the beginning of reddit.
TIL "beginning of Reddit" comprises the time up to and including July 2023.
Aaaand...?
expired
Interesting idea.
Small instances are cheap, so we need a way to prevent 100 bot instances running on the same server from gaming this too
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Votes were just a number on reddit too... There was no magic behind them, and as Spez showed us multiple times: even reddit modified counts to make some posts tell something different.
And remember: reddit used to have a horde of bots just to become popular.
Everything on the internet is or can be fake!
Everyone forgot how he and his wife announced their marriage in a subreddit nobody knew about that suddenly rise up to the first place on r/all.
Just lie? You really thing someone would do that!? Just go on the internet and tell lies?
Since the launch back in 2005.
This is really important to call out. Also though the bots have gotten so good it would be hard to tell the difference. To be honest though I'm pretty sure reddit was teeming withing them and it didn't really bother me. lol
I have strong feelings about reddit being infested with bots too. And because reddit could, there's no reason lemmy doesn't have the same issue.
Bot armies could have hidden things from you that would bother you deeply, but because it's hidden, you don't have a chance to be bothered.
Ignorance is bliss?
Honestly, thank you for demonstrating a clear limitation of how things currently work. Lemmy (and Kbin) probably should look into internal rate limiting on posts to avoid this.
I'm a bit naive on the subject, but perhaps there's a way to detect "over x amount of votes from over x amount of users from this instance"? and basically invalidate them?
How do you differentiate between a small instance where 10 votes would already be suspicious vs a large instance such as lemmy.world, where 10 would be normal?
I don't think instances publish how many users they have and it's not reliable anyway, since you can easily fudge those numbers.
10 votes within a minute of each other is probably normal. 10 votes all at once, or microseconds of each other, is statistically less likely to happen.
I won't pretend to be an expert on the subject, but it seems like it's mathematically possible to set some kind of threshold? If a set percent of users from an instance are all interacting microseconds from each other on one post locally, that ought to trigger a flag.
Not all instances advertise their user counts accurately, but they're nevertheless reflected through a NodeInfo endpoint.
Surely the bot server can just set up a random delay between upvotes to circumvent that sort of detection
Federated actions are never truly private, including votes. While it's inevitable that some people will abuse the vote viewing function to harass people who downvoted them, public votes are useful to identify bot swarms manipulating discussions.
This. It's only a matter of time until we can automatically detected vote manipulation. Furthermore, there's a possibility that in future versions we can decrease the weight of votes coming from certain instances that might be suspicious.
And it’s only a matter of time until that detection can be evaded. The knife cuts both ways. Automation and the availability of internet resources makes this back and forth inevitable and unending. The devs, instance admins and users that coalesce to make the “Lemmy” have to be dedicated to that. Everyone else will just kind of fade away as edge cases or slow death.
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That's exactly what a vampire that was here 100 years ago would say.
This man is over 100 years old
The only real early adopter
Even older than the project itself. Nice.. The alfa... The first, the only one
Happy centennial cake day
If it becomes too big of a problem, instances will whitelist the most popular instances instead of trying to blacklist all the bad ones.
How would that work? How will new instances/servers ever get a chance to grow if the fediverse only allowed those who are already whitelisted? Sorry for my limited knowledge about fediverse but it sounds like that goes directly against the base principle of a federated space?
It goes against the base principle, but, at the same time, is something quite possible to happen if things get out of control. Decentralization is complex, and brings several challenges for everyone to face.
PSA: internet votes are based on a biased sample of users of that site and bots
maybe we can show a breakdown of which servers the votes are coming from so anything sus can be found out right away. Like, it would be easy enough to identify a bot farm I'd think
Yep, give admins the tools they need to identify this activity so they can defederate accordingly. Seems like the only way.
I wouldn't be surprised if stuff like this is already in the works but the devs/contributors have a lot on their plate
So far, the majority of content that approaches spam I've come across on Lemmy has been posts on !fediverse@lemmy.ml which highlight an issue attributed to the fediverse, but which ultimately have a corollary issue on centralised platforms.
Obviously there are challenges to address running any user-content hosting website, and since Lemmy is a comminity-driven project, it behooves the community to be aware of these challenges and actively resolve them.
But a lot of posts, intentionally or not, verge on the implication that the fediverse uniquely has the problem, which just feeds into the astroturfing of large, centralized media.
This is something that will be hard to solve. You can't really effectively discern between a large instance with a lot of users, and instance with lot of fake users that's making them look like real users. Any kind of protection I can think of, for example based on the activity of the users, can be simply faked by the bot server.
The only solution I see is to just publish the vote% or vote counts per instance, since that's what the local server knows, and let us personally ban instances we don't recognize or care about, so their votes won't count in our feed.
that would be the best way to do it, i guess if you go further you could let users filter which instances they would like to "count" and even have whole filter lists made by the community.
I like that idea. A twist on it would be to divide the votes on a post by the total vote count or user count for that instance, so each instance has the same proportional say as any other. e.g. if a server with 1000 people gives 1000 upvotes, those count the same as a server with 10 people giving 10 votes.
Wouldn't that make it actually a lot worse? As in, if I just make my own instance with one user total, I'll just singlehandedly outvote every other server.
I think it would actually be pretty easy to detect because the bots would vote very similarly to each other (otherwise what's the point), which means it would look very different from the distribution of votes coming from an organic user base
Upvotes aren't just a number, they determine placing on the algorithm along with comments. It's easy to censor an unwanted view by mass downvoting it.
Some instances don't allow downvoting. It doesn't really matter, mass upvoting the remaining content has the same effect.
I disagree, i just got massively bandwagon downvoted into oblivion in this thread and noticed that as soon as a single downvote hits, it's like blood in the water and the piranhas will instantly downvote, even if its nonsensical. Downvotes act as a guide for people that don't really think about the message contents, and need instructions on how to vote. I'd love if comments got their votes censored for 1 hour after posting.
Better if the votes are permanently hidden to users and are only visible to mods, admins and the system.
You are absolutely right. Best solution. I've tried to think of different ways to do it and your way is just hands down easiest and best. Thanks for saying it.
I don’t think obstructing or hiding votes is the way to go. Them being public is actually better and it should be transparent to all users. Besides that what prevents spammers and vote manipulators to setup their own instances to see the votes?
That sounds like a solution that basic administration/moderation is meant to solve. You need to feel how bad brigading is to understand the need to not be able to downvote/see downvotes. Other instances can see the votes, which keeps the system honest and removes the need for individual users to have transparency.
I was referring to bots: whether they downvote one post/comment to -1000, or upvote the rest to +1000, the effect is the same... for anyone sorting by votes.
In regards to people, I agree that downvotes are not really constructive, that's why beehav.org doesn't allow them.
But in general, I'm afraid Lemmy will have to end up offering similar vote related features as Reddit: hide vote counts for some period of time, "randomize" them a bit to drive bots crazy, and that kind of stuff.
For bots the simple effect on the algorithm is similar either way, i agree. When we can see the downvotes though is my problem. If bots downvote you -1000 then it gives admins more info to control bot brigading, but helps users act like chimps and just mash the downvote button. Imagine having a bot group that just downvotes someone you don't like by a reasonable number of votes for the context. You'd be so doomed. If that same bot group only gave upvotes to the bot-user then it'd be totally different in the thread.
IMO, likes need to be handled with supreme prejudice by the Lemmy software. A lot of thought needs to go into this. There are so many cases where the software could reject a likely fake like that would have near zero chance of rejecting valid likes. Putting this policing on instance admins is a recipe for failure.
shocked shocked
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There's a reason everyone comes to my saloon...
Did anyone ever claim that the Fediverse is somehow a solution for the bot/fake vote or even brigading problem?
I think the point is that the Fediverse is severely limited by this vulnerability. It's not supposed to solve that specific problem, but that problem might need to be addressed if we want the Fediverse to be able to do what we want it to do (put the power back in the hands of the users)
I see your point... votes from a compromised instance (or instances) and such. How is this more or less vulnerable to a centralized model?
I'm not a security expert by any means, though I would imagine this type of attack can more be more easily made harder to execute if all accounts have to go through one server first. Lemmy seems to be as strong as the weakest link in this regard, but a centralized model is just a single link. I imagine that any effective strategy that works for Lemmy is much easier on a centralized platforms, even though the reverse statement isn't true.
That said, I'm optimistic that this gets figured out. Centralized platforms have had decades to solve this problem and we're just getting started.
You mean to tell me that copying the exact same system that Reddit was using and couldn’t keep bots out of is still vuln to bots? Wild
Until we find a smarter way or at least a different way to rank/filter content, we’re going to be stuck in this same boat.
Who’s to say I don’t create a community of real people who are devoted to manipulating votes? What’s the difference?
The issue at hand is the post ranking system/karma itself. But we’re prolly gonna be focusing on infosec going forward given what just happened
What did I miss?
Last night a hacker(s) used an exploit to manipulate the content on multiple instances including lemmy.world.
Fake/bot accounts have always existed. How many times has a "YouTuber" ran a "giveaway" in their comments section?
Yes but you presumably had to go through a captcha to make each one, whereas here someone can spin up an instance and 'create' 1 million accounts immediately.
This gives me an idea;
Don't store incoming data from remote instances into the "Main DB" immediately. Store them into SUBORDINATE DATABASES!
The logic of how you arrange these subordinate databases should be simple; depending on which instance you're communicating with you could select a subordinate database like so;
I don't have experience with systems like this, but just as sort of a fusion of a lot of ideas I've read in this thread, could some sort of per-instance trust system work?
The more any instance interacts positively (posting, commenting, etc.) with main instance 'A,' that particular instance's reputation score gets bumped up on main instance A. Then, use that score with the ratio of votes from that instance to the total amount of votes in some function in order to determine the value of each vote cast.
This probably isn't coherent, but I just woke up, and I also have no idea what I'm talking about.
Something like that already happened on Mastodon! Admins got together and marked instances as "bad". They made a list. And after a few months, everything went back to normal. This kind of self organization is normal on the fediverse.
I believe db0 is working on something like this to help combat the eventual waves of spam and stuff were going to see.
I think people often forget federation is not a new thing, it's a first design for internet communication services. Email, which is predating the Internet, is also federated network and most popular widely adopted of them all modes of Internet communication. It also had spam issues and there where many solutions for that case.
The one I liked the most was hashcash, since it requires not trust. It's the first proof-of-work system and it was an inspiration to blockchains.
Now days email spam filter especially proprietary from Google or Verizon yahoo really make indie mail server harder to maintain and always got labeled as spam even with DKIM, dmarc, right spf, and clean reputable public IP
I don't know what the answer is, but I hope it is something more environmentally friendly than burning cash on electricity. I wonder if there could be some way to prove time spent but not CPU.
I wonder if it's possible ...and not overly undesirable... to have your instance essentially put an import tax on other instances' votes. On the one hand, it's a dangerous direction for a free and equal internet; but on the other, it's a way of allowing access to dubious communities/instances, without giving them the power to overwhelm your users' feeds. Essentially, the user gets the content of the fediverse, primarily curated by the community of their own instance.
when you say import tax do you mean actual monetary payment? Or a computing power tax? I don't think I understand
I was reading it as lowering the value of an upvote from instances that are known to harbor click farming accounts. I could be wrong though.
Creating a foreign exchange for upvotes? 1 upvote from lemmy.world account = 25 upvotes from acconamatta.basementlemmy?
Maybe adjust by the number of upvotes coming from that instance (negatively) and by the number of upvotes users of your instance give over their (positively). If one instance spams upvotes, these upvotes loose value. If posts on that instance are popular with your users, the upvotes coming from that instance are more likely to have been made by real users. Maybe we can find a better metric to estimate the number of real, active users on another instance.
Sounds interesting, imilar to the way googles page rank works.
Yeah, that's the idea
Edit: but I was thinking the result to be specific to your instance, rather than a fediverse-wide vote-rank standardisation.
So, e.g. to a viewer signed into lemmy.ml votes from within lemmy.ml would count more; but to the member of ispamlemmywithhate.crap, votes from ispamlemmywithhate.crap would count more
That defeats the purpose of decentralization and creates a dangerous precedent. The entire point of Lemmy is that every instance is equally valid and legitimate. If certain instances are elevated above others, we're on our way to do what Gmail and Microsoft did to email.
So, I didn't mean instances treated unequally in the grand, set-in-protocol scheme of the fediverse - as if some centralised authority/agreement that this instance counts for more than that. Just as defederation doesn't make meta's instance authoritatively illigitimate.
But an instance can choose, within that instance, to defederate with another; likewise an instance within itself could deprioritise some or all others' instances' votes.
Still agree dangerous precedent ...but still wonder if some sort of instance-controlled moderation of external content is eventually necessary in the future. Or, I suppose, there could be separate services (much like ad-block lists) that users individually could enable to auto-moderate/adjust their own feeds.
And (sorry for waffling!) I suppose it depends a lot on how much you browse specific communities and how much you scroll "all" or whatever. Back in the before-days, I'm used to subbing to very few communities, and generally lazily browsing r/all
Out of interest, within a community (that's what a sublemmy is called, right?) is there any facility to prioritise votes of people subscribed to that community over those not subscribed? Was that the thing with brigading before (sorry, didn't realise this before!) that mods can moderate and ban posts/posters but not votes/voters?
I agree it would be a dangerous precedent.
Thing is, though, every instance is not equally valid and legitimate: that's the reason for defederating from Threads.
Not sure what you mean by what Gmail and Microsoft did to email? Do you mean that they assume many unknown email origins are spam? Though Gmail's obviously attracted a lot of users, and I myself have moved off it now to paying for my email provider elsewhere, I was under the impression it's been quite good for email and for pushing secure email, and being good at anti-spam.
I mean that Microsoft and Gmail took over the email protocol and right now if you stand up your own email server with a new domain/IP you basically have zero chance to get your mail delivered anywhere. They've positioned themselves as "higher" authority because of the sheer number of users they control and can now control the entire email system.
Same thing could happen with instances if we elevate lemme.world or any other instance to be "more legitimate" so their user votes count higher.
Uh no. Just implement DKIM if your messages are not being sent correctly. Spam is killing email, making admins implement more protocols such as DKIM but that isn't "google and Microsoft killing email"
Oh, I'm not saying I agree, I definitely think it sets a dangerous precedent
I would imagine this is the same with bans I imagine there will be a future reputation watchdog set of servers which might be used over this whole everyone follows the same modlog. The concept of trust everyone out of the gate seems a little naive
I‘m not a fan of up- and downvotes, also but not only for the aforementioned reasons. Classic forums ran fine without any of it.
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.
I keep thinking about this. The only reason for votes that a forum cant do, is filtering massive content quantities through an equally massive userbase to get pages of great and revolving posts. In a forum you can just filter with comments/hour and give free promotion to new posts.
I like upvotes, otherwise I’d have stayed on forums. It’s also one of the only ethical algorithmic sorting methods as long as you can whitelist your members.
Ironically, I agree and upvoted this.
I ironically up vote this also. Agreed to no upvote and downvot.
Lets cut the sorting to chronological order. With options to arrange to new or old only.
I’ve always wondered if it would help to have to reply in order to give an up/downvote but I assume it would likely just result in more spam. Still, I hope people are thinking of new ways to try things
Here’s an idea: adjust the weights of votes by how predictable they are.
If account A always upvotes account B, those upvotes don’t count as much—not just because A is potentially a bot, but because A’s upvotes don’t tell us anything new.
If account C upvotes a post by account B, but there was no a priori reason to expect it to based on C’s past history, that upvote is more significant.
This could take into account not just the direct interactions between two accounts, but how other accounts interact with each of them, whether they’re part of larger groups that tend to vote similarly, etc.
What if account B only ever posts high quality content? What if everybody upvotes account B because their content is so good? What if they rarely post so it would be reasonable that a smaller subset of the population has ever seen their posts?
Your theory assumes large volumes of constant posts seen by a wide audience, but that's not how these sites work, your ideal would censor and disadvantage many accounts.
If an account is upvoted because it’s posting high-quality content, we’d expect those votes to come from a variety of accounts that don’t otherwise have a tendency to vote for the same things.
Suppose you do regression analysis on voting patterns to identify the unknown parameters determining how accounts vote. These will mostly correlate with things like interests, political views, geography, etc.—and with bot groups—but the biggest parameter affecting votes will presumably correlate with a consensus view of the general quality of the content.
But accounts won’t get penalized if their votes can be predicted by this parameter: precisely because it’s the most common parameter, it can be ignored when identifying voting blocs.
No, I completely disagree and reject your premise.
Many times really high quality content will be voted for by only a small subset of the population.
In general people will vote for lowest common denominator widely appealing click bait. That type of content will get varied voters because of wide appeal. Discerning voters represent a smaller but consistent subset of the population, and this proposed algorithm will penalize that and just lead to more low quality widely appealing click bait.
Sure, the “consensus view of general quality” will depend on the opinions of your user base—but if that’s the source of your objection, your issue is with the user base and not vote manipulation per se.
Your oversimplification makes it sound like this is just my personal preference, and not a natural tendency of humans or social media interactions.
This is not just "I like X more", this is "humans on a large scale act like probabilistic decision trees and will converge on lowest common denominator dopamine fountains without careful checks and considerations"
The latter is necessary for high quality networked media and discussion
Thank you for this. I'd upvote you, but you've already taken care of that.
Two solutions that I see:
No need to make all federation under a whitelist. It's enough to ignore votes from suspicious instances or reduce their weight.
Depends if the rate of creation of the suspicious instances is higher than the mods can manage.
New instances would have a lower voting weight by default.
I wonder if there's a machine learning technique that can be used to detect bot-laden instances.
Reddit had/has the same problem. It's just that federation makes it way more obvious on the threadiverse.
Votes are just a number that determine what everybody sees. This will be manipulated by all the bad actors of this world once Lemmy becomes mainstream. Politicians, dictators, Hollywood, tech companies....
What is the definition of a "fake account"?
In this context it would be an account with the sole purpose of boosting the visible popularity of a post or comment.
But that's kinda the point of all posts. You post because you want people to see something and you want your post to be popular so it can be seen by the largest amount of people.
Your right. You just asked what a "fake account" was though. I think it's generally accepted that if you create "alt" accounts for the sole purpose of vote manipulation, you're being a dick.
Why am I being a dick, I was genuinely curious. What do you mean "vote manipulation"? Like making a post with one account and creating another one to upvote the post?
I didn't mean YOU are being a dick. If SOMEONE creates “alt” accounts for the sole purpose of vote manipulation, they're being a dick. I was using the royal "you," a weird english language thing. You, yourself, are not a dick. We'll you might be, but I don't think so.
Sorry, I misunderstood. I definitely agree accounts created for the sole purpose of upvoting stuff/bot farms are bad. I just don't know if there's an effective way to fight it as they're getting pretty elaborate these days and it's hard to distinguish them from real accounts.
Pretty soon we'll be at the point where no one will trust anything on the Internet.
Are you an academic or just dense?
I thought beehaw is all about inclusivity and safe space and friendly shit
Who says I’m not being inclusive. If I want to provide a helpful answer to the question, I must know what perspective they’re asking from.
Let’s go academic with it, and skip straight past “impossible to answer” directly to heuristic / attribute analysis.
What are the attributes / behaviors / tells of a fake account?
Assuming a users upvote history or karma ever meant anything, this demonstrates perfectly it's useless on Lemmy.
I wonder if an instance could only allow votes by users who are part of instances that require email verification or some other verification method. I would imagine that would heavily help reduce vote manipulation on that particular instance.
This alone wouldn't help because I can just set up an instance that requires email verification (or any other kind) and automate it still since I can make infinite emails with my own domain.
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Instances can just defederate with those servers
that's only an option if they are obvious about it
That can only be done after the fact, and people can just create new ones constantly can they not? There needs to be a different pro-active defense to watch for the signs of manipulation and counter them as they happen.
Whitelist federation is one strategy. Rather than defaulting to federation with every instance a proactively moderated instance would only federate with approved requests.
That would kill small instances though, definitely personal ones for those who want to run their own. Once places like lemmy and kbin get big enough there is no way they're going to go through and hand-federate every tiny new instance that pops up. There'd be no way to tell which ones are personal and which ones would be used for manipulation?
You can still read posts witjout federation. And you could still comment on theirs within your home instance. You just wouldn’t be able to post within their instance.
If we stop spam accounts from brand new or low usage servers those could both be easily mailed (emulated activity, pre-create instances and let them marinate)
I don't know much about how making new instances works, but could someone create instances in large qualities with smaller populations with the goal of giving human moderators too much work to defederate them all?
There are legitimate reasons for creating a “low-usage” server to host your personal account, so you have full control over federating etc.
If we start assuming all small instances are spam by default, we’ll end up like email now—where it’s practically impossible for small sites to run their own mail servers without getting a corporate stamp of approval from Google.
This would actually be a bit more difficult. So first it would be easy for me to set up lemmy1.derproid.com, lemmy2.derproid.com, etc. but if you could just defed from *.derproid.com it's no problem. However setting up lemmy1.com, lemmy2.com, etc. is more expensive because you would need to register and pay for each of those domains individually.
That's not to say it's impossible but there is a bigger barrier to it.
I agree, but it's also worth keeping in mind that a bot swarm approach could be much more distributed. There used to be a guy on the Fediverse that set up "relay accounts" on many, many instances with public signups, prior to hooking them all together with a single app and making them spit out torrential fountains of garbage.
It is 100% possible to abuse other people's public services to make remediation more complicated. Blocking a bad instance or a series of bad instances is easy. Dealing with a run-away spam problem from dozens of friendly servers is way harder.
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@koper@feddit.nl @fediverse@lemmy.ml oh yeah nothing from servers in terms of numbers can really be trusted
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People may not like it but a reputation system could solve this. Yes, it's not the ultimate weapon and can surely be abused itself.
But it could help to prevent something like this.
How could it work? Well, each server could retain a reputation score for each user it knows. Every up- or downvote is then modified by this value.
This will not solve the issue entirely, but will make it less easy to abuse.
Ok, but what would the reputation score be based on that can't be manipulated or faked?
Well, you see Kif, my strategy is so simple an idiot could have devised it: reputation is adjusted by "votes" so that other users can up or downvote another.
Thus solving the problem, once and for all.
I'm assuming this is a joke based on the Futurama references you used, but just to be clear for everyone: this won't work because it simply moves the problem one step further. How do you prevent bots from upvoting other bots to build a reputation?
As mentioned: It's not the silver bullet solution but something that raises the bar for abuse. The reputational score is build up over time on the specific server based on the up- and downvotes you received.
So, yes, this can be abused itself as well - but it requires a lot more effort.
Wouldn't a detection system be way better? I can see a machine learning model handling this rather well. Correlate the main accounts to their upvoters across all their posts and create a flag if it returns positive. It would be more of a mod tool, really.
I have already ran into a very obvious Russian troll factory account and it really drags down the quality of the place. Freedom of speech shouldn't extend to war criminals and I'd rather leave any clusterfuck that allows it, whether they do it through will or incompetence.