Everyone I have something very important to say about The Agora.
The Problem
Let me be super clear here to something people don’t seem to understand about lemmy and the fediverse. Votes mean absolutely nothing. No less than nothing.
In the fediverse, anyone can open a instance, create as many users as they want and one person can easily vote 10,000 times. I’m serious. This is not hard to do.
Voting at best is a guide to what is entertaining.
As soon as you allow a incentive the vast majority of votes will be fake. They might already be mostly fake.
If you try to make any decision using votes as a guide someone WILL manipulate votes to control YOU.
one solution (think of others too!)
A counsel of trusted users.
The admin, top mods may set up a group to decide on who to ban and what instances to defederate from. You will not get it right 100% of the time but you also won’t be controlled by one guy in his basement, running 4 instances and 1,000 alts.
Now i’m gonna go back to shit posting.
I… posted proof of vote manipulation… perhaps, not yet detected here- but, its legitimately effortless to do (and to be extremely hard to detect)
https://lemmyonline.com/post/11492
two days before this comment was made…
When you run a script which randomly generates bot accounts on other various servers- you aren’t going to notice anything tied back to a particular profile.
In the case of the proof I linked, the bot names were very generic, and extremely easy to spot. However, its VERY easy to have the bot generate real usernames.
Its also, extremely easy to have the workflow generate actual comments, related to random posts and conversations too.
Lastly- despite my username, this actually is not a bot account. lol.
Ok, I get that bots exist on Lemmy, but I don’t think they have the capability to infiltrate a tiny community such as this just yet. Please keep an eye out and inform me immediately if you see suspicious activity. I appreciate the information regarding their capabilities.
That’s exactly what your username already says xD