this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2023
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Lemmy

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For discussion about the lemmy.ml instance, go to [email protected].

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Unidan could just create an account on multiple instances and vote for his posts/comments with all these accounts. That way his content would gain more attention than those of sincere users.

In case of malicious bots (like those annoying bootleg bots on reddit), it might even be profitable for them to create their own instance(s) just for that purpose.

Is there a mechanism to prevent that? (other than user/instance banning and the introduction question on user creation)

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (3 children)

There isn't and Lemmygrad.ml users have been doing it in the past. Mostly down-vote brigading though and this is the main reason why down-votes are disabled on our instance.

Personally I think there should be a setting to prevent down-votes from federating as there is really no point in federating them to instances with other rules and different community culture.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Huh - I had not even considered downvotes in other instances... Yeah that seems problematic. Maybe rather than defederating downvotes, there could be a way to differentiate between local and global up/downvotes.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

This sounds interesting. I see two possibilities for that:

  • Let downvotes from external users be less effective
  • Display up/down ratio twice, once from local votes and once from external votes; plus only have the local ones affect sorting

Actually when I think about it, a combination of both would also be possible.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Just let each instance/community decide its own policy. People will naturally flock to whichever policy works out.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Nice idea.

Global and local votes is an interesting idea, reflective of echo chamber vs general consensus.

Not sure how effective it would be in addressing the point raised by OP, but it might have value in its own right.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Brigaded up-votes are almost as harmful as brigaded down=votes. Down-votes also keep out the trolls until a critical mass of trolls has been reached. Hopefully there are more advanced methods in the future.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago

I thought neoliberal Europeans/USians practice vote brigading and lying about geopolitics?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Malicious instances would need to be blocked by the instance you are registered to.

As for multiple accounts - couldn't the same thing be done on reddit? Just make a bunch of alts and self-inflate your own posts/comments.

These issues are as old as the internet and can only be mitigated, not prevented.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Reddit has some kind of detection for that and you will get banned for using alts to vote your posts up.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I guess this kind of instances will be banned. If it becomes obvious.

There are already a bunch of spam-bot-instances, the admins have to spot them and block them actively.

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