Based on my own experience operating websites… my guess is that they keep track of browser strings, IP addresses, and login times - and have some kind of offline job that can study all the same accounts that use the same IP addresses around similar times.
I suspect when when the admin looks at an account they can see information about your IP address history, geolocations, browsers, and detected secondary accounts.
Also keep in mind they have a lot of tools to try and prevent vote manipulation. Even when there are zero email addresses, for over a decade the Reddit code tries to detect if someone logs out and logs in to grant multiple upvotes to the same posting.
Even when it isn’t my own posting, I’ve sometimes upvoted the same posting from two accounts - and see that the count did not go up the same. That’s why I assume there is some kind of underlying awareness within the (server) app that the accounts are related.
On a site like Lemmy and Reddit, vote manipulation is key to getting postings to the top of the page. I imagine Lemmy will eventually encounter rogue federated instances that try to game the system. I remember 10 years ago when Reddit had to start building a lot of anti-spam features into the code. But I really dislike how they black-hole comments based on keywords and I was always opening issues in their /r/Bugs subreddit to complain about their instant removal of comments that had certain keywords (in 2020, posting a link to the BBC about anti-vaccination would trigger it on major subreddits that had their spam filter set high).
Based on my own experience operating websites… my guess is that they keep track of browser strings, IP addresses, and login times - and have some kind of offline job that can study all the same accounts that use the same IP addresses around similar times.
I suspect when when the admin looks at an account they can see information about your IP address history, geolocations, browsers, and detected secondary accounts.
Probably. I mean the most obvious thing would be email.
Though my original reddit account never even had an associated email address.
Also keep in mind they have a lot of tools to try and prevent vote manipulation. Even when there are zero email addresses, for over a decade the Reddit code tries to detect if someone logs out and logs in to grant multiple upvotes to the same posting.
Even when it isn’t my own posting, I’ve sometimes upvoted the same posting from two accounts - and see that the count did not go up the same. That’s why I assume there is some kind of underlying awareness within the (server) app that the accounts are related.
On a site like Lemmy and Reddit, vote manipulation is key to getting postings to the top of the page. I imagine Lemmy will eventually encounter rogue federated instances that try to game the system. I remember 10 years ago when Reddit had to start building a lot of anti-spam features into the code. But I really dislike how they black-hole comments based on keywords and I was always opening issues in their /r/Bugs subreddit to complain about their instant removal of comments that had certain keywords (in 2020, posting a link to the BBC about anti-vaccination would trigger it on major subreddits that had their spam filter set high).