this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2023
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Lemmy Online

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We were poking around the list of Lemmy servers, and we saw this crazy anomaly. 1.2 million comments in the course of a day or two .... what's going on over there?

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Sorry- just saw this. @[email protected]

Was messing around helping out development for anti-spam/botting/etc.... and realized, it was literally as easy as updating a single field in the database to completely fake the numbers.

I had "1 million users" for a week or two, before I reset it back to the actual number, because it was setting off some of the bot alarms.

But... yea, all of the "stats", are essentially effortless to manipulate.

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

On the contrary!

Was actually making a point on how effortless it was to manipulate those metrics, to evade some of the current, common tactics for detecting bot instances.