I'm trying out kbin.social for the time being since Lemmy.world keeps erroring out and the web ui is pretty bad (yes, i have third party apps already).

There is so much astroturfing on Reddit these days. I'm sure there are people being paid to manipulate the narratives on social media. Even if it wasn't a local entity, it'd be an easy way for foreign governments to sow discord (pretty cheaply). Can you imagine? All you have to do to reach millions of Americans is to pay a person(s) to log into 1000 accounts and upvote something or give awards to a post. Reddit doesn't care cuz they get the moneys and they get the "engagement" they need to IPO.

Does boosting cost anything? What's to prevent people from just boosting instead of upvoting?