Lemmy

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Everything about Lemmy; bugs, gripes, praises, and advocacy.

For discussion about the lemmy.ml instance, go to [email protected].

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(How) Does Lemmy prevent brigading and other vote manipulation? (feddit.de)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Unidan could just create an account on multiple instances and vote for his posts/comments with all these accounts. That way his content would gain more attention than those of sincere users.

In case of malicious bots (like those annoying bootleg bots on reddit), it might even be profitable for them to create their own instance(s) just for that purpose.

Is there a mechanism to prevent that? (other than user/instance banning and the introduction question on user creation)

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (5 children)

There isn't and Lemmygrad.ml users have been doing it in the past. Mostly down-vote brigading though and this is the main reason why down-votes are disabled on our instance.

Personally I think there should be a setting to prevent down-votes from federating as there is really no point in federating them to instances with other rules and different community culture.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Huh - I had not even considered downvotes in other instances... Yeah that seems problematic. Maybe rather than defederating downvotes, there could be a way to differentiate between local and global up/downvotes.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

This sounds interesting. I see two possibilities for that:

Let downvotes from external users be less effective
Display up/down ratio twice, once from local votes and once from external votes; plus only have the local ones affect sorting

Actually when I think about it, a combination of both would also be possible.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Nice idea.

Global and local votes is an interesting idea, reflective of echo chamber vs general consensus.

Not sure how effective it would be in addressing the point raised by OP, but it might have value in its own right.

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