I mean if that’s what we worry about then essentially everything could have that problem. What’s to stop an instance from artificially increasing their upvote counts so their posts are always at the top.
Sure, but the amount of work involved scales differently. To inflate post or comment rankings by a thousand votes, you’d need to create a thousand separate fake upvotes per item, whereas for subscription totals you misreport one number and the effect is permanent. That would make malicious actors harder to detect.
I mean if that’s what we worry about then essentially everything could have that problem. What’s to stop an instance from artificially increasing their upvote counts so their posts are always at the top.
Sure, but the amount of work involved scales differently. To inflate post or comment rankings by a thousand votes, you’d need to create a thousand separate fake upvotes per item, whereas for subscription totals you misreport one number and the effect is permanent. That would make malicious actors harder to detect.