Have you ever noticed that post and comment points on Reddit seem to fluctuate? That’s intentional, and it’s called “vote fuzzing”, basically, Reddit is randomizing what score is displayed. Reddit almost never shows you the real score of a post or comment and claims that it’s for defense against “vote manipulation”. I don’t think that even makes sense because people generally vote manipulate by voting from multiple accounts, and all the votes are accounted for so randomizing it shouldn’t really matter. However, it’s massively annoying because it makes it impossible for anyone to gauge just how many people voted on a post or comment and what its actual approval rating is.

It’s one of the most annoying things about Reddit, so I implore the Lemmy developers to never implement something like this. Mind you, this is different from vote backlogging which suspends totaling of inbound votes when the server is under heavy load, but I imagine backlogs don’t last for very long and it actually serves a benefit.

  • DessalinesMA
    5·
    5 years ago

    Don’t worry I don’t plan on ever doing that. Apparently their rationale was to “counter bots” … well why not actually counter them by not letting bots vote?

    The whole idea that they need to lie about votes is pretty ridiculous.

    • AgreeableLandscapeOP
      1·
      5 years ago

      I think we need to have a registration process for bots: the accounts need to have a permanent flair saying they’re a bot, and they’re banned from voting or subscribing, and any bots that are not registered as bots are not allowed.

      • DessalinesMA
        4·
        5 years ago

        Bots if they’re ever allowed will be a separate concept / entity from users. And an some point I’ll have to add some more prevention like captchas.

        • AgreeableLandscapeOP
          2·
          5 years ago

          Please use self-hosted open source captchas when you do, they do exist! I’m so sick of seeing reCaptcha feeding Google usage data.

          • DessalinesMA
            2·
            5 years ago

            Agreed. I hate recaptcha too, free labor for the google.

          • oriond
            1·
            5 years ago

            Best Captchas I have ever seen are from Lichess They show a chessboard and say Mate in 1… in a pretty obvious position

        • DJWalnut
          2·
          5 years ago

          a dedicated system to distinguish between two types of users, humans and bots, would be helpful