Hi just a heads up. Check out this post: https://sh.itjust.works/post/37758799

It got so many upvotes in a such a short time I checked out its activity from an mbin instance. And most of these upvotes are coming from sh.itjust.works accounts which were all created 2 months ago, most on 2/16, and have never posted/commented. There was a similar post in the lemmy.world/c/world community linking to the same website and having a similarly high number of upvotes within minutes, but that post seems to be gone now.

  • otacon239@lemmy.world
    25·
    24 days ago

    Thank goodness for the open platform that Lemmy is. It’s nice knowing that these things can be caught so easily.

    • FundMECFS@lemmy.blahaj.zone
      10·
      23 days ago

      Though it’s a bit of a confirmation bias. Only the ones we caught are those we know about.

      I won’t detail how, but it would be pretty trivially easy to make it much harder to catch. This is just utter laziness on behalf of the vote manipulators.

      I think a statistical analysis that looks at what accounts nearly only upvote the same comments or posts as another account would probably be the DIY gold standard for catching vote manipulation on the lemmyverse.

      • Sixty@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        3·
        8 days ago

        People only really need to manipulate new posts with a small handful of initial upvotes to get the ball rolling usually yeah.

        • ThreeJawedChuck@sh.itjust.works
          3·
          14 hours ago

          to get the ball rolling usually yeah

          I’ve always been a little skeptical of the up/downvote mechanism on any social media platform. It makes it so easy to weaponize the human bias towards group conformity, by doing exactly what you described.

          I won’t try to argue the voting has no benefits. It can be helpful to reduce the reach of truly bad faith posts for example, and everyone loves the little dopamine hit of seeing one’s own posts upvoted - me included. Just that it also has real drawbacks, and I’m not sure whether the good outweighs the bad.

          • Sixty@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            1·
            7 hours ago

            I may be more willing to be skeptical. I’m not sure if the reduction in bad faith is really worth the downsides of vote ranking myself.

            If SomethingAwful can survive to this day without it and an intact strong community identity, I think it comes down to the usual things that tip the scales heaviest of all things considered: Site ownership, moderators. A sense of humour doesn’t hurt either.