this post was submitted on 30 Jan 2024
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So I was going through /all and this admin is snooping at vote counts for posts in his instance and then posting it publicly.

Just a reminder that these kind of petty people exist. Pick a trustworthy instance or better yet, host your own.

Archive: https://archive.md/oybyL

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[–] [email protected] 98 points 9 months ago (7 children)

The votes are public. Kbin displays them right in the UI. Lemmy semi-hides it, but it's never been designed to be private in any way.

Changing instance won't do shit if that's a concern to you. As an admin I can see them even if my instance isn't involved with the post at all:

[–] [email protected] 23 points 9 months ago (1 children)

So really, I just need to host my own instance to see votes. Nice.

[–] [email protected] 33 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Meet new friends, find new foes!

A table of downvotes

What's the worst that could happen?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Oh boy.

Brigading is back on the menu boys! /s

(Don’t actually do this)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

And this is why we have access to the votes, and why the protocol doesn't obfuscate them.

Admins can deploy scripts to detect those kinds of patterns and act on it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I hope the "published" column is the time at which that user downvoted you and not the time at which you posted the original content... there is less than 2s in between some.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago

It was the time of each of the downvotes. I'm pretty sure the behavior was done by a bot, because there were way more downvotes across a bunch of unrelated posts.

I have way more data than my own, and there's a few users I've identified who appear to be botting other users aggressively. Not sure where to drop that data set, but it'll be funny.

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