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.
Corporations could use it to push their ads to the top
This is near inevitable if this platform takes off.
Advertisers gonna advertise.
I was actually talking to someone that works in advertising and for big companies this is unlikely. Pepsi for example pays a lot for the guarntee that their product ads won’t appear near posts they don’t want them to. Since Lemmy advertising would only be through regular posts where they have no control over this, they likely wouldn’t risk the potential detriment to brand perception.
Now this can change if the potential reach of Lemmy is big enough but that size will be different for each company.
Probably true. it’s the agencies who are desperate and likely to be looking to chatGPT to outsource ad copy who are going to be looking to capitalize.
No community is really above being targeted, because the good campaigns done by people in the niche tend to be indistinguishable from good posts.
Just rip them in the comments and boycott their brand
Edit: or even meme them into the ground. I could start a parody account if I saw someone advertising. I could pretend I’m them and align myself with nazi values in satire ads hypothetically.
This is exactly why they wouldn’t risk officially advertising here. Not enough control over the platform leads to too much risk to brand perception.