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News flash: it’s not just ask Reddit. It’s Reddit entirely. That place is a shithole of bots.
Beep, boop! I am a bot, and this action was performed naturally.
Am I really a bot though?
The only good answers I find to things are 3+ years old.
Yeah. That or niche subreddits that just aren’t popular enough to warrant bots. Like specific game communities. But even some of the big ones are full of bots.
It has been for a long time.
AskReddit was a junk pit anyway, so it would not be a loss, even if it wasn’t reddit.
Pissing off all their best users sure was a fantastic idea.
Why isn’t lemmy taken over with bots yet? Is it just a matter of time?
We have a bot problem, but we also have admins/ mods that don’t want to bloat their numbers with bots (mostly). The fediverse helps us hold each other accountable, and if any community is full of bots, you defedirate them. I don’t mind the auto posters that seed content. I like the OSRS update bot, etc…
Indeed. It’s a problem for any online platform, but the hope is that it’s a self-limiting problem here because of the natural segmentation of the network and given than admins aren’t trying to sell advertisement views.
How do you know I’m not a bot? :)
Why do you assume it’s not happening already?
WHY ARE YOU YELLING
Just got a random message from a new account I suspect of being a bot or scammer.
But lemmy is still small enough, and has mods/admins that are less jaded and defeated than the bigger platforms, that there is a bigger pushback on the scams.
Every site has a critical mass at which scammers will be more motivated than the moderators. Reddit got too big, then shit all over the experienced mods. Double whammy.
Everyone on lemmy is a bot except you.
There’s little potential here and we ban them quick enough.
Beep boop
Oh fuck I blew my cover
My guess is we’re still too small and niche to be a tempting target.
I think the federated nature of lemmy will make it an easy target when it does come along though.
Disclaimer: I don’t really know what I’m talking about.
Edit: Spelling
There are bots and astroturfers on Lemmy now to be clear, just not nearly to the point of the disaster that is R-town. That said, it’s not nearly as bad. The point i wanted to make is that federation is the one thing protecting Lemmy from corporate bot/shill takeover. The way Lemmy will be reddit’d/digg’d would be if centralization of servers became high enough that corpo corrupted ones become the defacto servers, who’d cut federation with the smaller privately-owned instances we currently enjoy.
01001001 00100111 01101101 00100000 01100001 00100000 01110010 01100101 01100001 01101100 00100000 01101000 01110101 01101101 01100001 01101110
Hold on just a darn tootin’ minute here. That there’s robot speak, ain’t it? We don’t take too kindly to robots, fella. Are you a robot, or ain’t you? We’ll defederate you mercifully.
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There’s currently (*comparatively) no money to be made with bots given Lemmy’s comparatively small size, I’d wager. Bots on Reddit are used to advertise and to push companies’ agendas. Lemmy’s too small for that
There is definitely money to be made. Whether it is shilling for a product or even attempting to inflate market share in the hopes of converting said market share into either donations or outright selling to investors.
Yeah, I don’t think they have figured out how to properly manipulate lemmy yet (I have seen a shocking amount of facebook “why don’t these kinds of posts go viral” levels of nonsense, for example). But bots are cheap and to pretend that there is not an active effort to figure out how to manipulate us is naivety, at best.
Maybe it is just that I am an old. I watched reddit fall. Hell, I watched fucking gamefaqs “fall”. Not to mention usenet and the rest. Because the reality is that where there are people, there is money. And modern day advertisement techniques (whether it is AI bots or just people in a warehouse in the global south) are increasingly cheap.
If Lemmy had the numbers Reddit does, we’d have more bots. I expect our admins are more responsive and more willing to take risks (like banning legit users when they’re a false positive for a bot). But the APIs available also make bots easier.
The longer term solution is probably a paid instance and/or identify verification. A one-time fee of $5-15 would significantly hinder bots and help the fediverse to be sustainable. It means bans stick much better, and slows cheap bots from having infinite attempts to achieve indistinguishably.
Identity verification comes with its own problems, but they may be workable. People don’t want to post under their real names, but that information doesn’t need to be revealed. It could be possible to have regional instances that verify and publish only your general location, such as state or county.
Well, not literally no money to be made but compared to reddit, I meant. But you’re absolutely right.
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Because there’s no value in it at the moment. Reddit accounts sell for quite a bit of money as they can be used for marketing or propaganda.
A lot of the site feels like it’s been overrun by bots. The more niche communities seem to still be pretty good (and I do still enjoy engaging in them). But the subs like ask Reddit, Aita and the relationships one? Yea, it all feels like bs.
I think it’s due to the fact that a lot of mods left and the API changes made it harder to auto moderate subs.
I stay away from any big subs now. The smaller stuff that tends to have 2 to 15 posts a day (like game specific subs) feel like they did before. Although I really feel a lot of those are going to discord as well.
Yea same. Now that you mention that, gaming really is one of the only reasons I’m on there anymore. Destiny for example, still has a pretty active sub. But to your point, the couple discord groups I’ve joined over the past couple years are way better.
If only the niche communities over here were a bit more active. For instance, I’ve been hyperfixating on Tamagotchi, but there isn’t a Tamagotchi community here yet :(
Create one, friend! It’ll start off slow, but it may build up.
for real!! im also currently fixated on tamagotchis and the tamagotchi sub is the only active community i could find, im pretty sure tamatalk has been dead for a while :[
You should make one!
I’d like to, but I’ve never really run a community before and I need some pointers 😓
Why is this a JPEG. I barely can read that text in red.
Maybe your client? Renders clear and legible for me
I have tried to read that text on my desktop PC, so I was visiting regular site, but I must say that the picture is much clearer on my phone.
I guess it’s mostly because my gaming monitor is not that good at displaying colors or some other shit.
dark red on grey
Needs more JPEG
I would almost be okay with a proffer that it is bots asking the questions, but that the discourse is between human beings. That’s all I really care about. It’s rare that I respond directly to OP, or at least I do so less frequently than I’m responding to someone in the comments.
I remember back in the early days on forums, sometimes they’d just feel dead, and it was mainly a lack of content (threads). Once a thread would open, us morons behind keyboards could talk it to death, or more likely just divert in perpetuity.
That’s a really good use for bots, since new users haven’t seen the best posts and may actually enjoy discussing them. Older users can simply move on, filter from their stream if they get bored of it.
but I the real human get permanently banned from all of reddit for “ban evasion” (I deleted my account to change my name and accidentally posted a comment over a month later) and my appeal gets denied in 2 hours 🙃
remember when they banned bots on r/mademesmile or something and there were no posts anymore?
How could mods ban all the bots posing as human users?
Wasn’t that just recently?
Wholesome memes, actually.
The worst part is that they’re all really fucking bland questions. The shit you’d see on Facebook.
Some may have been copied directly from Facebook since most bot posts copy from ones humans have made before.
They’re engagement fodder designed to elicit human responses to provide a larger training dataset for future LLMs. That and to drive up Reddit usage and engagement numbers.
Using this low of a contrast (dark red on dark background) is criminal. Maybe my eyes are just that bad but good lord those notes are hard to read
Yeah it’s awful. My vision is pretty good but this literally hurts to look at
This just proves that OP is not a bot, he is a dumb human like us
It’s not even mine, I put the source in the post.
But I agree with the poor colour choice
After this comment I am exactly 27.3% more suspicious of OP being a bot after all.
Not necessarily. Bots can read text equally well on any colour. This might prove he is a bot.
In any case, a crime has been committed. Call the cops.
how are people so bad with colors
