Vote fuzzing. Are we seriously doing this here now too??
Vote fuzzing. Are we seriously doing this here now too??
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 gregorum@lemm.ee
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.
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.
Lemmy is open source. You're welcome to take a look at the code yourself if you don't believe others.
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)_/¯
What is vote fuzzing?
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.