The best part of the fediverse is that anyone can run their own server. The downside of this is that anyone can easily create hordes of fake accounts, as I will now demonstrate.
Fighting fake accounts is hard and most implementations do not currently have an effective way of filtering out fake accounts. I’m sure that the developers will step in if this becomes a bigger problem. Until then, remember that votes are just a number.
I got suspended multiple times because my partner and daughter were also in our city’s sub, and sometimes one of them would upvote my comments without realizing it was me. It got really fucking annoying, and of course there’s no way to talk to a real person at reddit to prove we’re different people. I’d appeal every time and they’d deny it every time. How reddit could have gotten so huge without realizing that multiple people can live in the same household is beyond me. In the end they both just stopped upvoting anything in the sub because it was too risky (for me).
That’s such a hilariously bad metric for detecting a bot network too. It wouldn’t even work to detect a real one, so all that policy ever did was annoy real users.
Hearing that, I wonder if they were using an IP address based system. That would cause real problems for people using a VPN, but it wouldn’t surprise me.