Making Bot Attacks Costly

There is a simple reason bot attacks are so common on social media: they are cheap and they work.

Think about how the systems we are all used to — call them like/upvote-based systems, or LUBS — are built. Anyone can vote on anything, as often as they want, with zero consequences. Your vote counts the same whether you read the post or not, whether your account is three years old or three minutes old, whether you are a person or a Python script running on a rented server. There is no cost to voting and no penalty for getting it systematically wrong. No skin in the game at all.

So of course people game it. You want your product on the front page? Hire a click farm. You want to push a political narrative? Run a bot network. The tooling is mature, the services are openly for sale, and the results are immediate. LUBS are not structurally designed to resist this. They are designed to measure engagement, and bots engage just fine.

It also matters that LUBS are not real democratic voting. There is no defined electorate, no clear question being asked, no binding outcome. A good track record of thoughtful participation usually counts for nothing. A fresh account votes with the same weight as a veteran contributor. When the system cannot tell genuine participation from manufactured noise, manufacturing noise is the rational move.

Why we think Veridonia is harder to game

One of Veridonia's stated design goals is "resistant to capture, not dependent on trust." Not as a feature — as a structural property. The question is what makes manipulation expensive here when it is so cheap on LUBS. The mechanisms below are part of our voting system, described in more detail there.

Start with the cost of voting. On LUBS, a vote is free: cast as many as you like, in any direction, with no consequence. On Veridonia, every vote on whether a post gets in runs through a prediction-based rating system (PBRS): an Elo-style mechanism where your rating rises when your votes match the community outcome and falls when they don't. Every vote is a bet that the community will agree with you. Bots voting without understanding the community tend to end up on the losing side and lose rating over time. Coordinated actors pushing content the community does not actually want lose rating too. And falling rating means tighter posting limits, exclusion from higher-impact decisions, shrinking influence across the board. Ratings are also local to each community, so influence built in one place does not transfer to another. On LUBS, manipulation is free. Under PBRS, it compounds against you.

Next, consider who gets to vote. On LUBS, anyone who sees a post can vote on it, which means an attacker just needs to direct enough accounts at the right target. On Veridonia, you do not choose which posts to vote on. You are randomly selected, like jury duty, unless an editor has put their own post to everyone who can be reached. You cannot target your effort when you do not control who is in the room. On LUBS, the relationship between bot accounts and influence is direct: more accounts, more votes, more impact. Under sortition it is different in kind: adding accounts increases your odds of being drawn into a panel, but you cannot guarantee presence in any specific decision, and for a fixed number of accounts the advantage grows weaker as the community gets larger.

Then there is multi-round voting. In larger communities, posts pass through two rounds: a random sample of the community filters noise, and what survives goes to a smaller, higher-rated panel whose majority decides. You control neither draw, and you cannot choose which decisions you are in. An attack here costs scale you have to hold — enough accounts, present when decisions open, for as long as you want influence. Compare that to LUBS: hire some people, run a script, instant and guaranteed. And none of it is hidden. Every panel, every vote and every rating movement is on the public record, so a packed decision is one anyone can point at — and what got in that way can be removed.

And even if something does slip through, an editor can remove it. If the editor is the problem, the removal can be appealed to a fresh panel drawn at random from the community's other editors, with the person who removed it excluded. Another draw the attacker does not control, another barrier.

On top of all this, we do the ordinary stuff too. PBRS-based throttling limits how often low-rated users can post. New accounts inherit the lowest rating already tied to the person — both across the communities they belong to and via their origin — so spinning up fresh accounts from the same source gets progressively worse. None of these are unique, but layered on top of PBRS, sortition, and MRV, they close off the cheap paths that LUBS leave wide open.