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.
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.
Over a houndred dollars for 700 upvotes O_o
I wouldn’t exactly call that cheap 🤑
On the other hand, ten or twenty quick downvotes on an early answer could swing things I guess …
For the companies who want a huge advantage over others, $100 is nothing in an advertising budget.
I have a small business and I do $1000 a week in advertising.
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.
