You know we all escaped Reddit for greener pastures. But I have increasingly noticed that greener pastures are not to be found in the Fediverse either.
I undeniably witnessed some vote fuzzing this morning and I feel a bit psychologically violated whenever I notice people or companies or platforms engaging in psychological manipulation.
It does make me feel livid.
Update - case closed because:
Wisdom from [email protected]
There is no vote fuzzing in Lemmy. The software doesn’t support it. Period.
I’ve been paying attention to the Lemmy mod tools and Lemmy admin Matrix rooms, and it’s been the subject of major discussion over the past week between one or two users who keep bringing it up and, like, everyone else (including the Lemmy devs) who are all like, “no, not now, not ever.”
It’s not a thing.
SO, what could explain what you’re seeing?
Possible explanations include:
Vote brigading
Alt account abuse
A genuine statistical fluke where there are genuine votes that are producing this bizarre pattern, and hopefully it will subside soon along with your reasonably justified paranoia.
The solution to all of these possibilities, and possibly others that I did not enumerate here, is to just ignore the problem and move on with your life. Remember: nothing that happens here is really important.
I really hope this makes you feel better. Because it should.
Thank you for your confident assurance. I want to believe what you say is true.
But I saw the weirdest thing this morning, I made a comment on a rather old post where no one else was participating, and the comment was buried deep in the thread In the middle of 130 other old rusty forgotten comments, highly unlikely that anyone else in the universe would even be digging in there. But within a half hour my comment had 5 upvotes which I found strange, then a few minutes later it was back to 1 neutral point, where it remains and where it should be.
It was weird.
Removed by mod
Okay that makes sense, but my point is that nobody should’ve been there in that old abandoned post to begin with, impossible to accidentally upvote when no one is even there, much less FOUR UPVOTES all at the same time, 115 comments deep, in an old forgotten dusty post.
Because that’s what happened. My obscure lonely hidden comment instantly went from 1 point to 5 points then back to 1 again.
It was weird and that’s what made me assume vote fuzzing was going on.
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Excellent breakdown. Thank you!
Yup! I was already over this hours ago, but people keep responding to this so I keep responding to their responses 😂
I will officially close the case now because I’m over it.
Removed by mod
Lemmy is open source. You’re welcome to take a look at the code yourself if you don’t believe others.
What is the comment in particular? It is possible that someone was sorting by new comments on the front page, which would show your comment regardless of the original post’s age. Or it could have been some odd bug, but there is definitely no vote fuzzing on Lemmy.
The comment was “I guess Shrek has a GoPro around his waist”
okay I’m glad to hear there is no vote fuzzing here, so maybe it was some odd bug, or if perchance someone was sorting by new comments on the front page, it must’ve been FOUR PEOPLE all at once because suddenly I had 5 points and then suddenly it went back to 1.
Keep in mind it can take a few minutes or longer for some votes to come in from other instances due to how federation works. Sometimes a group of votes can get backlogged and all come in at once. Other times they’ll show instantly. It’s just a minor tradeoff to using decentralized social media
Yes, that makes sense. The problem is there shouldn’t have been any upvotes at all. and certainly not 5 all at once this morning that suddenly disappeared. It should’ve been an old abandoned post pretty much. But now that I’ve brought yall’s attention to it, any upvotes that might happen from this point forward I’d consider inorganic, So we can’t really study this particular matter now.
It’s at 1 for me. I’ll take a looks in 2 hours.
Yes, 1 point is normal and that’s all it should’ve ever had. The problem is that a few minutes after it was a new comment, suddenly it had FIVE upvotes all at once this morning, then it went back to 1. It was an old abandoned post and there was no reason anybody else would have been there, especially not four people upvoting one comment all at the same time.
Anyway now that I’ve brought yall’s attention to it, any upvotes that might happen from this point forward I’d consider inorganic, So we can’t really study this particular matter now.