What is vote fuzzing?
this post was submitted on 18 Mar 2024
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It's a tactic Reddit uses to artificially manipulate the appearance of how many upvotes a post or comment has received. The reason they manipulate the number of upvotes is...
it's a tactic of mild psychological manipulation, keeps users engaged, participating.
There is no vote fuzzing on Lemmy. Maybe you saw someone remove their upvote or change to a downvote, causing the score to change
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.
I change accidental votes all the time because I use a mobile app that’s heavily dependent on gestures, and swiping back often gets confused with a vote swipe. I’m sure I’m not the only one who does this.
Christian Selig spent years fine-tuning the swipe behavior in Apollo, and I guess it’ll take time before the swipe behavior in Lemmy apps reach the same level of polish. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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.
Well, here’s the thing: 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:
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Vote brigading - old-school reddit tactic to get a bunch of users to dogpile a comment with up votes or down votes to achieve the desired effect.
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Alt account abuse - you got a fan who hates you, and they registered several alto accounts on an instance or across several instances, and they use several logins to register multiple up and or down votes. Congratulations, you got a fan, and they hate you. There’s not much you can do, unless you can find proof and submit it to each and every instance admin and hope they care enough to take action, or you can just ignore it and feel pity for the person who has an obsession for you. I recommend the latter.
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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 good news is that the solution to all of these possibilities, and possibly other possibilities 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 to you individually, nor to any of this collectively with regards to what people really say or do here, so you can move on and live your life, secure knowledge that the things people do and say here and the votes that occur here as well as the comments will have absolutely no impact on your real life.
I really hope this makes you feel better. Because it should.
Excellent breakdown. Thank you!
ignore the problem and move on with your life. Remember: nothing that happens here is really important to you individually
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.
Glad to hear it. Some people never learn this lesson, and it makes them miserable. Some of them run Reddit. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Have a good evening!
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.