Unidan could just create an account on multiple instances and vote for his posts/comments with all these accounts. That way his content would gain more attention than those of sincere users.

In case of malicious bots (like those annoying bootleg bots on reddit), it might even be profitable for them to create their own instance(s) just for that purpose.

Is there a mechanism to prevent that? (other than user/instance banning and the introduction question on user creation)

  • poVoq@slrpnk.netEnglish
    3·
    1 year ago

    There isn’t and Lemmygrad.ml users have been doing it in the past. Mostly down-vote brigading though and this is the main reason why down-votes are disabled on our instance.

    Personally I think there should be a setting to prevent down-votes from federating as there is really no point in federating them to instances with other rules and different community culture.

    • rowdy@lemmy.mlEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      Huh - I had not even considered downvotes in other instances… Yeah that seems problematic. Maybe rather than defederating downvotes, there could be a way to differentiate between local and global up/downvotes.

      • CaptainBlagbird@lemmy.oneEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        This sounds interesting. I see two possibilities for that:

        • Let downvotes from external users be less effective
        • Display up/down ratio twice, once from local votes and once from external votes; plus only have the local ones affect sorting

        Actually when I think about it, a combination of both would also be possible.