this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2023
1923 points (97.1% liked)

Fediverse

17776 readers
36 users here now

A community dedicated to fediverse news and discussion.

Fediverse is a portmanteau of "federation" and "universe".

Getting started on Fediverse;

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
[email protected]
[email protected]
1923
PSA: Lemmy votes can be manipulated (feddit.nl)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
360 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[โ€“] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago

Surely the bot server can just set up a random delay between upvotes to circumvent that sort of detection