this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2023
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Fediverse

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PSA: Lemmy votes can be manipulated (feddit.nl)
submitted 1 year ago by koper@feddit.nl to c/fediverse@lemmy.ml
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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.

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[–] Puph@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I had all 8 accounts signed in on my third-party app and I could easily manipulate votes on the posts I posted.

There's no chance this works. Reddit surely does a simple IP check.

[–] Valmond@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I had one main account but also a couple for using when I didn't want to mix my "private" life up with other things. I don't even know if it's not allowed in the TOS?

Anyway, I stupidly made a Valmond account on several Lemmy instances before I got the hang of it, and when (if!) my server will one day function I'll make an account there so ...

I guess it might be like in the old forum days, you have a respectable account and another if you wanted to ask a stupid question etc. admin would see (if they cared) but not the ordinary users.

[–] averyminya@beehaw.org 2 points 1 year ago

Reddit will definitely send you PM's for vote manipulation

[–] Sal@mander.xyz 3 points 1 year ago

I would think that they need to set a somewhat permissive threshold to avoid too many false positives due to people sharing a network. For example, a professor may share a reddit post in a class with 600 students with their laptops connected to the same WiFi. Or several people sharing an airport's WiFi could be looking at /r/all and upvoting the top posts.

I think 8 accounts liking the same post every few days wouldn't be enough to trigger an alarm. But maybe it is, I haven't tried this.