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
You posted “Go vote Long Beach!” on the Long Beach reddit community around primary time, with a link to where people can find their voting place, but not anything like that on Lemmy (e.g. !longbeach@lemmy.world community)? Is that right?
