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It has been for a long time.
the average redditor will still insist on appending “Reddit” onto Google searches since it “lets them see real human opinions” only because they can’t discern obvious botting from genuine human interactions
A lot of the botting is just copy and pasting previous actual human topics and comments though, so they’re not really wrong.
Actual bot created content is pretty boring, and never “contributes” in a way that would make for a useful Google result. Your Google result may be a bot’s comment, but if that comment is answering a question of some kind there’s a 99% chance the comment was originally written by a human.
The content of bots (the desired ones) is at least not banned or removed by anyone. For example, I feel socially excluded by the Reddit and para-Reddit communities because whenever I write something a bit more controversial, it immediately ends up in the trash.
copying and pasting a comment is still less genuine, since that promotes stale and outdated information. It can also create the false idea of a “widely held” opinion rather than a single person’s opinion copied a dozen times.
promotes stale and outdated information. It can also create the false idea of a “widely held” opinion
Clue
Well, obviously. But I don’t give a shit about that when I just want a solution to a problem.
Why isn’t lemmy taken over with bots yet? Is it just a matter of time?
Everyone on lemmy is a bot except you.
How do you know I’m not a bot? :)
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.
Why do you assume it’s not happening already?
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.
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.
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.
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.
It kind of is, but mostly scripts to post to multiple communities and instances at the same time, at the beginning people said we needed content at any cost, now? I guess we still do?
But it’s rare to see someone post once and letting it federate, they rather post it everywhere (even if sometimes it barely fits a community) and get their sweet upvotes. Crossposting was supposed to help but sometimes I still see the crosspost and the original post for whatever reason.This is specially notable for news communities, meme/shitposting (constantly reposting the same things, sometimes even with the reddit watermark) and the nsfw instance (which is basically full of sellers and their cringe commenting bots).
WHY ARE YOU YELLING
There’s currently 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.
Well, not literally no money to be made but compared to reddit, I meant. But you’re absolutely right.
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.
I look forward to meeting my undeleted zombie Reddit account one day. I’m picturing it like Shaun and Ed at the end of Shaun of the Dead.
I’m almost tempted to turn off 2fa on my account and give it a weak password just to see what its next life becomes.
No offence to anyone here but fuck Reddit!
There was some nsfw bots I saw and some.karma farm bots some accounts looked like real users one of them only posted purely on that subreddit
They buy real accounts with established histories and karma. I even had a DM about selling my account for $200 in BTC a few years back. Probably would have if I didn’t like my user name.
makes sense but i remember i saw peoples dms they say wild nsfw stuff and one time someone dmed me a dagger for sale
Reddit is a cesspool.
What’s your favorite Iron Man scene from any of the Marvel Movies?
Fun thing to do is when you realize 99% of the internet is just advertising teams working for these rich fucking A hole’s, is you make them work for their money but posting things that PR companies would hate. Just culture jam the hell out of the dead internet. Its the only way to be. Its what makes places like r/joerogan and r/thefighterandthekid so much fun.
Can you provide examples?
Examples of what? Marketing teams? Check out a company called bent pixels.
To see it in action, check out r/marvel.
As far as culture jamming it goes, I don’t have many because it gets your account banned pretty fast.
Site wide ban as well, not just a particular sub.
It’s funny how Reddit is banning more genuine people everyday and letting the bots run wild.
It’ll get worse everywhere in the internet until we return to books and printed media again because we don’t know what’s fake and what’s real
just quote one here, or make one up. I also am curious to know what “culture jamming” even means.
https://youtu.be/LiWlvBro9eI?si=VE9hlntEkOLWZrlo
So there’s trolling which is just being a dick. Culture jamming is more about sending a message by using a lot of weird social behaviour and culture norms to throw a wrench into the mix. Sacha Baron Cohen did a bit of it more satirized. But the kings were “yes men saved the world”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_jamming
Because I was also curious. In short, I think it’s essentially saying shit that calls out advertising bullshit in an overt way while using the format that advertisers do.
Kinda like the magic glasses in the old movie “they live” but more colorful. Image for context:
Thank you - but I am somewhat oblivious how the poster that mentioned this term thought that this would “get your account banned” fast.
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.
That was true a decade ago
Ever since the War Lizard Gaming Forum shutdown Reddit has been 99% bot content
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.
I used to call out bots sometimes about 2-3 years ago and I can tell you it already was like this. The only difference is the addition of AI, but early bot networks just used Google translate back and forth to copy entire old posts without being noticed.
A lot of them are using old, pre-AI tactics, too, going by the image.
They often just copy highly upvoted answers to threads they deem as related
how are people so bad with colors
remember when they banned bots on r/mademesmile or something and there were no posts anymore?
Wholesome memes, actually.
Wasn’t that just recently?
