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Vote manipulation bots using sh.itjust.works?
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 11 May 2025
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Thank goodness for the open platform that Lemmy is. It’s nice knowing that these things can be caught so easily.
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.
People only really need to manipulate new posts with a small handful of initial upvotes 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.
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.