Votes are public and there’s no fuzzing like on Reddit, so shenanigans are pretty unlikely.
I run my own instance so I’m always a little paranoid that I fucked it up somehow. Or like, maybe theres a known bug that I don’t know about, or a compatibility issue between versions/platforms.
But as another commenter mentioned, at worse it’s some loser botting but more likely it really was just a coincidence.
Shenanigans are actually super easy if you care.
Can you elaborate?
You can log into like 5 accounts and basically put anything you want to the top of any comment chain given how low the total vote numbers on lemmy tend to be. An actual astroturfing group could curate the entire front page for pennies.
Sure, but again, it’s all public record, so the patterns become pretty easy to spot when you see brand new accounts vote-brigading, or always the same 5 alts that are doing it.
For example: https://kbin.social/m/kbinMeta/t/134579/Call-out-post-for-a-particular-karma-farmer-on-kbin-social
It’s public record but it doesn’t take much effort to obfuscate it’s happening. That’s why reddit fuzzed votes in the first place.
Chatgpt makes it really easy for the people inclined to write scripts to post comments and repost articles and spin up dozens or hundreds of accounts.
Captchas help but someone committed can throw $100 in and get many many accounts if they don’t want to do it themselves. IPv6 addresses to proxy the bots through are easy to get by the thousand too.
You also don’t use brand new accounts you roll them over the course of a few weeks or months.
And if you don’t want to actually DO any of that work you can just hire a service that already has the accounts to do it for you.
You can log into like 5 accounts and basically put anything you want to the top of and comment chain given how low the total vote numbers on lemmy tend to be. An actual astroturfing group could curate the entire front page for pennies.
The other commenter got to it already.
