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.
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.