I’ve noticed some users (seemingly randomly) get massive voting power in the text-to-image plugin gallery, i.e. their upvotes and downvotes matter far more than others and can single-handedly fling an image almost to the top of the trending page or make a trending image vanish to the abyss. This can help with turnover on the trending page, but a lot of the time it just leads to the “supervoter” spamming a bunch of similar images and flooding the trending page with their own images. Then, just as randomly, the supervote capability will go away and it’s back to their vote barely having any effect.
It’s obvious from watching the ai-text-to-image-generator gallery enough that not everyone’s vote is equal, and for a while I suspected shenanigans from botnets to people colluding with circles of friends to collectively upvote their stuff, but then I experienced being a supervoter and then it all made sense.
I was practically curating the ai-text-to-image-generator trending page myself for the last couple days, but now my votes don’t matter again. 😅
It seems unlikely this is a bug, though I’m curious why it was implemented if it’s intended behavior.
To be clear, I'm not just speculating, I've been testing! I've had it go into effect three separate times, and it's clearly tied to an IP address (or, more likely, a userKey, which is tied to IP address.) When I switched to another internet connection (and thus IP address), my votes lost their power and had no visible effect, but I could switch back to the original connection and continue consistently having stronger votes that would move things significantly up or down in the gallery--until eventually it wore off, for reasons I don't have a theory on.
One theory I debunked is that maybe if you get upvoted a lot, your votes would carry more weight, but that didn't pan out because the next time it happened to me was on an IP address that I hadn't even posted anything on, while the IP address from which I had posted quite a few fairly popular images had no voting power.
So I 100% know this is a thing that happens. Maybe it IS a bug (though that seems farfetched); maybe it's just for fun; but at this point I can't think of a way to discover under what conditions it happens without getting that answer from someone on the inside. 😛
Regarding people with too much time on their hands voting multiple times - no, I'm 99% sure there are server-side measures in place to prevent vote spam. There is eventually a timeout after which it will accept another vote, but I think it's on the order of hours, so obviously not a viable way to move anything significantly up or down the gallery.