you simply cannot prevent someone from creating hundreds of accounts
You can’t, but you can make the process more difficult and slower. This is, more or less, infosec and here it’s rarely feasible to provide guarantees of unconditional safety. Generally speaking, the goal of defence is not so much to stop the attacker outright, but rather change his cost-benefit calculation so that the attack becomes too expensive.
a way that doesn’t allow an army of hundred zombies to do significant damage
The issue is detection: once you know they are zombies, their actions are not hard to undo.
The issue is detection: once you know they are zombies, their actions are not hard to undo.
Generally true, but with Reddit code and Reddit database schema, everything is hard (both detecting the zombies and undoing their actions). One of the reasons to move to LessWrong 2.0.
(This may be difficult to believe until you really try do download the Reddit/LW codebase and try to make it run on your home machine.)
You can’t, but you can make the process more difficult and slower. This is, more or less, infosec and here it’s rarely feasible to provide guarantees of unconditional safety. Generally speaking, the goal of defence is not so much to stop the attacker outright, but rather change his cost-benefit calculation so that the attack becomes too expensive.
The issue is detection: once you know they are zombies, their actions are not hard to undo.
Generally true, but with Reddit code and Reddit database schema, everything is hard (both detecting the zombies and undoing their actions). One of the reasons to move to LessWrong 2.0.
(This may be difficult to believe until you really try do download the Reddit/LW codebase and try to make it run on your home machine.)