There are no protections against trolls. At this point a dedicated group of less than a hundred could probably take over the vote.
I'd actually love to see more dedicated troll attacks. So far the main attack seems to buy $SEB since it's so expensive, but sometimes it later gets sold at a profit.
Personally, I've mentally written off the $50k so, I'll just be enjoying the show.
Actaully the pubsub part is pretty core to system overall. Basically I have a set of 'operations' modules each operating independently (gathering news, tweets, votes, stock quotes, etc). They publish that data over the pubsub system, so that all the subscribers (mostly in-memory caches) read and update accordingly.
Game events also get published through it (round end, trade placed, new round, etc)
Thought a lot about this during the development period, but nothing materialized. I might do it someday but would probably need to ramp up the scoring algorithm first.
One of the reasons I decided to do this project in the first place is because nobody has ever done this before (at least based on my research), and I wanted to be the first. There are plenty of stock simulators out there, so fake money didn't sound appealing to me.
Actually, those two bits are pretty small. Theres a ton of code all over github for interacting with Robinhood. The twitch chat API is really just IRC. Glueing those together was the easy part.
The more interesting and complicated components are the UI and the scheduling and a publish-subscribe module that I created, tho no plans to open source it anytime soon.
Shameless plug: https://stockstream.live/