this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2023
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This was a problem on reddit too. Anyone could create accounts - heck, I had 8 accounts:
one main, one alt, one "professional" (linked publicly on my website), and five for my bots (whose accounts were optimistically created, but were never properly run). I had all 8 accounts signed in on my third-party app and I could easily manipulate votes on the posts I posted.
I feel like this is what happened when you'd see posts with hundreds / thousands of upvotes but had only 20-ish comments.
There needs to be a better way to solve this, but I'm unsure if we truly can solve this. Botnets are a problem across all social media (my undergrad thesis many years ago was detecting botnets on Reddit using Graph Neural Networks).
Fwiw, I have only one Lemmy account.
There's no chance this works. Reddit surely does a simple IP check.
I had one main account but also a couple for using when I didn't want to mix my "private" life up with other things. I don't even know if it's not allowed in the TOS?
Anyway, I stupidly made a Valmond account on several Lemmy instances before I got the hang of it, and when (if!) my server will one day function I'll make an account there so ...
I guess it might be like in the old forum days, you have a respectable account and another if you wanted to ask a stupid question etc. admin would see (if they cared) but not the ordinary users.
Reddit will definitely send you PM's for vote manipulation