Teppic

Some people use apps which hide posts they have interacted with. A downvote counts as interaction so people in turn then liberally downvote nearly everything. Yes it’s unhelpful and dumb. Solution, use kbin and at least you can see who downvoted you! (Except I don’t think downvotes are federated).

…or Mint depending whether they’d rather move up, or down the hierarchy.

Ernest has made a few updates to improve moderation recently e.g.
https://kbin.social/m/kbinDevlog/t/615294/kbin-RTR-9-Protection-against-spam-and-several-optimization-improvements
https://kbin.social/m/kbinDevlog

If you use kbin you can even see who has made each upvote, so yes easy to then look for patterns of voting together and also at the profiles to see if the accounts looks like real people etc.

Posts and comments are federated (synchronised). Upvotes are actually a bit of a fudge, they are actually ‘Favourites’ if considered from an activity pub (e.g. Mastodon) perspective, and yes favourites are also federated.
Downvotes don’t exist in activity pub and, as a result, they do not federate between instances.
At least that is my understanding.

Not even sure it’s EEE, they just clone and provide the clone of a good product for free and/or as part of windows.
Their products are usually only second best, but kill the market leader anyway.

Actually… Reddit was open source until 2017.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reddit
But the rest of your comment still stands.

Not even modified, cap_wolf just linked the following week.
The post is this one: http://www.oldsundaycomics.com/pics1/S1450-0697.jpg
Which is 19 Dec 1937 as stated.

Very much so, and equally possible in theory (interference patterns with light exist, light cancellation could work somewhat like noise cancelling) but also equally impossible to do at anything much above an atomic scale.

“It really kicks the llama’s ass” (on Linux)
…or it once did, pity it isn’t really available anymore.

From the paper the picture is of an and gate.
https://wpmedia.wolfram.com/uploads/sites/13/2018/02/20-2-2.pdf

???
I’ll just presume you agree with everything I said since you didn’t mention any aspect of it.

While some of what your say is true, the examples you give are not good ones. The Amazon example has far more to do with EU/US data residency requirements (e.g. GDPR), and practicalities about how things like local taxes are treated. In games it has more to do with latency and ping times and also you don’t want 10,000 people waiting for one particular mob to spawn because of a quest or drop.

This is where I link my own post from a few days ago - but basically to say kbin is actually a very good way to browse Mastodon “Toots”, and yes you can post just as easily too.
https://kbin.social/m/fediverse/t/275724/Browsing-the-wider-fediverse-from-kbin

Or there is more to this, e.g.
https://mastodon.world/@josephwelch/110601006061292330

Humans would browse anonymously, and then if/when they make an account they will test things like making comments, upvotes etc.
Take a looks at this instance:
https://the-federation.info/node/details/48405#
https://picify.podycust.co.uk/
45k+ accounts (rising fast) and it’s a ghost town. 9 posts, 33 comments.

But the question “why” strands. 200 upvotes will get you on the front page at the moment. Why not stop there, why make your bot accounts so conspicuous that they are basically garenteed to get deleted?

They’ve just spoon fed us the data to help us identify them, and given us incentive to do so too. It just seems counter productive.

It seems almost certain that there are farms creating these accounts - but why? The sheer volume of them is going to make them easy to identify and delete, and if the admins of the instances don’t delete them the instances will be defederated in short order.
I fail to see any value to having 1 million+ bot accounts. What are we missing?