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.
For the companies who want a huge advantage over others, $100 is nothing in an advertising budget.
I have a small business and I do $1000 a week in advertising.
Yeah, 700 upvotes soon after a post is made could easily shoot it up to the top of even a popular sub for a few days (specially with the lack of mod tools rn), with others upvoting it purely because it already has alot of upvotes.
the only problem here is that 700 reddit upvotes is not “huge advantage over others”. i honestly fail to see how someone could pay $100 for that. i’d consider $10 too much.
or do you spend your $1000 budget on 7000 reddit upvotes? :D
700 extra upvotes in the first couple hours on a medium sized hobby sub is an enormous amount and will give you great exposure to potentially tens of thousands of potential customers who won’t just ignore it like some banner ad (since they’ll think it’s real content).