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Detecting vote manipulation or brigading (example) (yiffit.net)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by Wander@yiffit.net to c/meta@yiffit.net

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After reading this post here I took a deep dive into the database and ran a few queries to see if I could use it to detect some basic manipulation such as brigading or other types of persistent hostile behavior.

I'd describe this as people who could have blocked a certain community but instead seemingly dedicate themselves to continuously downvote posts, maybe because they don't like furry stuff in general.

Each line in the image corresponds to one person and how many times they have downvoted posts in a given community.

I won't take any actions right now, this is all very experimental. I just wanted to share this with y'all to let you know that we admins have tools to give us clues about whether some sort of brigading is going on.

Interesting stuff. Personally, I'd urge people who don't like furry stuff to just block a community and carry on. There's nothing to be gained by obsessing yourself with stuff you don't like.

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[–] WalterLatrans@yiffit.net 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Not universal but it's the unfortunate reality that people obsess over stuff they don't like as a form of internalized repression. They better be careful though, looking at so many furry images while downvoting they may eventually catch the pathOwOgen.

It's nice that you can get this information by querying the database directly but it would be nicer still if it was built into the admin or mod interface somehow. Although I imagine in order to compile that information you used some sort of DB aggregation which could be unexpectedly resource intensive on larger instances so perhaps not.

I wonder how possible it would be to create some sort of plugin system for lemmy to add functionality like this and more that would only be of interest to particular lemmy instances. That could help to keep the core of the server small and lightweight while giving people the option developing and installing server resident bots, additional functionality, and user interface enhancements as they see fit.

[–] Wander@yiffit.net 8 points 1 year ago

Yeah, I had to join something like 4 database tables together.

I'm interested in seeing if someone could develop a statistical model that could accurately detect certain behavior. I can query the data but I don't know enough statistics to really make use of it.

[–] hawkwind@lemmy.management 2 points 1 year ago

I've been thinking about this most of the day. This represents, like you said, people with nothing better to do, grouped by how much the user dislikes a community.

You could take action targeting these users. BUT, what about sneakier brigading. For sure there will be users with even MORE nothing better to do.

For example, if they have multiple accounts spread across multiple servers and automate downvoting?

Maybe, a super simple solution is to rate limit downvotes? I mean it's not elegant, but if it were slow enough, it prevents burying things.