1958
PSA: Lemmy votes can be manipulated (feddit.nl)
submitted 1 year ago by koper@feddit.nl to c/fediverse@lemmy.ml
339 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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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[-] Wander@yiffit.net 82 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] toish@yiffit.net 42 points 1 year ago

“Shill” is a rather on-the-nose choice for a name to iterate with haha

[-] Evergreen5970@beehaw.org 20 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I appreciate it, good for demonstration and just tickles my funny bone for some reason. I will be delighted if this user gets to 100,000 upvotes—one for every possible iteration of shill#####.

[-] thanks_shakey_snake@lemmy.ca 0 points 1 year ago

Oh cool 👀 What's the rest of that table? Is the actor_id one column in like... an upvotes table or something?

[-] Wander@yiffit.net 2 points 1 year ago

actor_id is just the full url of an user. It has the username at the end. That's why I have censored it.

this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2023
1958 points (97.5% liked)

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