We had a couple of reports today of vote manipulation happening in the Australia community. After investigating, I’m seeing a trend:
https://aussie.zone/post/21203876
https://aussie.zone/post/21124048
https://aussie.zone/post/21194319
https://aussie.zone/post/21130833
The votes in all these posts look like this. In this example, only two of the downvotes look legitimate. The rest are coming from three instances that don’t appear to be real Lemmy sites. One of them doesn’t even resolve.
Please don’t scare me with a title like that so soon after an election.
That sort of vote manipulation wouldn’t be posted to this community. 😄
I’m a little surprised at how many people have seen this post. More people subscribe to Meta/browse Local than I would have guessed. Whichever it is, I love how engaged our users are in the health of the instance. You guys are great!
Right I was worried they would demand a redo and it might not go so well
Apparently these were fly-by-night operations, because now fun.with.kyun.li appears to be an unconfigured Nginx server, and jenny.nya.pub & red.computersforpeace.net don’t even have DNS addresses.
Geez, putting me on blast a bit 😆
For the record, I only downvoted
twothree of the linked posts (once each!)You are absolutely allowed to downvote anything you’d like to see less of. Yours was one of the two legitimate downvotes I was speaking of.
Nothing is secret on the internet these days.
Hmm, looks suss.
I read a comment somewhere recently that the upvotes and downvotes don’t really do anything on Lemmy.
If thats the case, is their seeming coordination for downvoting having a meaningful effect?
Votes 100% matter in Lemmy. It certainly affects the ‘hot’ sort type.
It affects literally every sort type except new
Wait, mods can see which member downvotes a post?
Anybody can see it. The info is very lightly hidden, and available to anybody with an ounce of interest.
Full disclosure: I honestly thought everyone could. 😆
Mods can see all votes in communities that they mod, up and down.
Admins can (I believe) see all votes, full stop.
Admins can (I believe) see all votes, full stop
This is correct, with the caveat that the votes must have federated with the admin’s instance (so other instances need a user to be subscribed to the community in question, and votes can take time to flow through).
I’ve added jenny.nya.pub, fun.with.kyun.li, and red.computersforpeace.net to our instance blocklist.
Is it possible to have code to automatically block fake instances that don’t resolve?
