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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Reddit admins manipulated vote counts all the time.

expired

This is really important to call out. Also though the bots have gotten so good it would be hard to tell the difference. To be honest though I'm pretty sure reddit was teeming withing them and it didn't really bother me. lol

Honestly, thank you for demonstrating a clear limitation of how things currently work. Lemmy (and Kbin) probably should look into internal rate limiting on posts to avoid this.

I'm a bit naive on the subject, but perhaps there's a way to detect "over x amount of votes from over x amount of users from this instance"? and basically invalidate them?

Votes were just a number on reddit too... There was no magic behind them, and as Spez showed us multiple times: even reddit modified counts to make some posts tell something different.

And remember: reddit used to have a horde of bots just to become popular.

Everything on the internet is or can be fake!

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.

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

I think people often forget federation is not a new thing, it's a first design for internet communication services. Email, which is predating the Internet, is also federated network and most popular widely adopted of them all modes of Internet communication. It also had spam issues and there where many solutions for that case.

The one I liked the most was hashcash, since it requires not trust. It's the first proof-of-work system and it was an inspiration to blockchains.

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

This is something that will be hard to solve. You can't really effectively discern between a large instance with a lot of users, and instance with lot of fake users that's making them look like real users. Any kind of protection I can think of, for example based on the activity of the users, can be simply faked by the bot server.

The only solution I see is to just publish the vote% or vote counts per instance, since that's what the local server knows, and let us personally ban instances we don't recognize or care about, so their votes won't count in our feed.

So far, the majority of content that approaches spam I've come across on Lemmy has been posts on !fediverse@lemmy.ml which highlight an issue attributed to the fediverse, but which ultimately have a corollary issue on centralised platforms.

Obviously there are challenges to address running any user-content hosting website, and since Lemmy is a comminity-driven project, it behooves the community to be aware of these challenges and actively resolve them.

But a lot of posts, intentionally or not, verge on the implication that the fediverse uniquely has the problem, which just feeds into the astroturfing of large, centralized media.

IMO, likes need to be handled with supreme prejudice by the Lemmy software. A lot of thought needs to go into this. There are so many cases where the software could reject a likely fake like that would have near zero chance of rejecting valid likes. Putting this policing on instance admins is a recipe for failure.