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.

expired

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!)

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.

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.

PSA: internet votes are based on a biased sample of users of that site and bots

Reddit had/has the same problem. It's just that federation makes it way more obvious on the threadiverse.

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.

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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.

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

Did anyone ever claim that the Fediverse is somehow a solution for the bot/fake vote or even brigading problem?

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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.

Reddit admins manipulated vote counts all the time.

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