this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2023
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Lemmy

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

For discussion about the lemmy.ml instance, go to !meta@lemmy.ml.

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Hey folks! Just realized something that makes Lemmy different from Reddit. Because of the federation, your votes are not technically anonymous on Lemmy. At least, I think.

Although there’s no UI to look at a user’s voting history yet, one could conceivably be built by an instance. Perhaps coincidentally, I hear there’s instances out there populated by mostly bots?

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[–] StingJay@lemmy.ml 21 points 1 year ago (3 children)

This would be interesting to see if certain articles were pushed up or down by bot accounts.

This could be anywhere from news articles being buried/promoted or by hidden advertising within a post.

[–] o_o@programming.dev 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

True! Also instances could each do their own brand of “vote manipulation mitigation” by counting or ignoring different sources of votes.

Other cool features come to mind, like having a separate vote count for voters from the local instance.

[–] UrbenLegend@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 year ago

Other cool features come to mind, like having a separate vote count for voters from the local instance.

That'd be cool. Like a big colorful number representing the total votes and then a smaller number right below that in parenthesis and a gray color to indicate local instance votes.

[–] ulu_mulu@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

That's interesting, tho I'd rather have that info seen by admins only, it could lead to brigading/harassment otherwise IMO.

[–] blivet@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

How do you identify a bot account?

[–] Geometric7792@kbin.social 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If they vote in a way I don't like, they're a bot. If they don't vote in a way that I like, also a bot. In fact, if they vote at all, probably a bot

[–] socsa@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago

Undercook the fish? Bot, believe it or not.