So there was just a burst of 11 upvotes for this story in 10 minutes, while during the same time period there were 3 downvotes.
I wonder if the same ratio will continue during the next 10-minute window or going forward; my bet is that the ratio will more or less reverse (or more), with downvotes dominating over time. What would cause an unusual number of people to all upvote this story all at once, right after it was posted?
Maybe I am wrong. Let’s see.
Edit: I am wrong, I think. Beyond that fact that this post obviously isn’t being downvoted heavily now that it’s established, I spent a while looking at this question, and I found some things that maybe looked hinky, but nothing outwardly and obviously suspicious. And you can’t really tell anything from the behavior right after a post – it’s all noise. After about 30-60 minutes, enough votes have been accumulated that you can say something about it, but before then, all bets are off.
It is well documented that many political-influence organizations have extensive social-media-fakery arms, and I’m absolutely certain that most of them have as their #1 priority from now until November to get Trump elected. And Trump is clearly a pile of elephant shit in human skin, so going after Biden for a variety of random bullshit (or just talking down the whole concept of democracy in general) is their best angle of attack.
It’s not self-evident that they’ve discovered Lemmy, but I feel confident at this point that they have. And if they have, it would be weird if they decided on posting only, that voting was a red line they didn’t want to cross.
It’s not self-evident that they’ve discovered Lemmy, but I feel confident at this point that they have.
Yes, how else can you explain the unpopularity of two pro-genocide candidates? Must be a conspiracy! Everyone loves Biden!
Honestly, just get yourself an account that allows you to see who votes and vote order, it will save you a lot of paranoia.
3 of the first 11 upvotes are people I recognise and have interacted with. It’s obviously not sockpuppets.
If the downvotes I can see, two of the first 3 are people I’ve recently interacted with as well.
I’m a non-US fediversian and I upvoted it because I thought the headline was funny and because I sympathise with Americans for having to choose between these two old men (who aren’t even Bernie Sanders, which would have been more understandable).
Just any kbin account will do it. The info is there in ActivityPub so sooner or later there will be a client that includes it, if there isn’t yet.
(My main’s at kbin.social but we are temporarily on read-only here at lemmy.world due to our servers going haywire, so to comment here I have to use my lemmy account).
I actually spent quite a while looking at it. Honestly, I found some things that I found a little suspicious, but nothing really all that compelling. I decided I was chasing ghosts and abandoned the analysis.
Since you asked, though, here’s what the ratio for this post looks like over time:
So, pretty much, exactly ordinary and as you’d expect it.
I mentioned some things I found a little suspicious – as an example, here’s the graph for this post which I also would have predicted to be a magnet for fake voting:
That one, to me, looks hinky. The slow dropoff after an initially elevated ratio looks like exactly what I’d expect if there was an organized effort right at the beginning to drop a bunch of fake upvotes. But… there could be a bunch of alternate explanations. It’s actually pretty difficult to get a prediction of what a “typical” post should look like, because there are a lot of variables and not a lot of data points (there aren’t that many posts that display the right combination of “controversial post” + “enough votes in total to get above the noise.”)
Like I say, I gave up the idea concluding that, on the balance, there’s at least not a strong indication that anyone is dropping fake votes in big batches.
I’ve been doing this for years and learned on Reddit what headlines get the most interactions. I’ve talked to you before about my Reddit account that I left during the API shutdown.
You can go look at my posts there too for more interaction data: https://www.reddit.com/u/return2ozma
