For the threads with the older one on the left: https://lemmy.world/post/14859950
(Thank you @[email protected] )
Lemmy will be full of bots too if it grows big enough. Enjoy the fleeting moment
Depends on the instance. Some instances will enshittify, others will fight against this sort of thing. Since Lemmy is federated, if we’re stuck on the former we can move to the latter without losing access to the entire network.
You can’t fight against it. That’s the point. The only tactic is to stay stealth as long as possible.
You won’t win with barrage of AI generated content and massive corporate machine of marketing. No filters or countermeasures are enough against the brute force of money. Not to mention Lemmy is relatively easy to spam and troll compared to Reddit if someone wants to do it.
It’s vulnerable by design because the same vulnerability is a feature of freedom of speech and openness when there are no bad actors.
It’s kind of like anarchism if you think about it. Great concept but collapses from miserable human condition.
I predict we will all(technical hyperliterates) be on some form of TOR sooner or later because that’s the only place where advertisers and ai won’t dare to go.
You can fight against it, but it’s an uphill battle. The most likely responses to work will be invite only systems for account creation (something I’ve seen predicted happening to art communities to filter out AI garbage) and some kind of reputation/report system to weed out spammers and the accounts that invited them.
Definitely, but we’re still quite far from that from a userbase size perspective
Yeah when it reaches that stage we will be brooding on lemmy_alternatives@lemmy to escape the corporate once more
It’s the ciiircle of life
The internet is full of bots, Reddit is no exception. Believe it or not, neither is Lemmy.
The internet is full of boobs, Lemmy is no exception. Ripley’s Believe It or Not, neither is your mom.
Please don’t think this is actually hateful porfis
More and more lately, I’ve been thinking about maybe we aren’t really meant to be this closely linked together. Like what if everyone just stopped using social media, like it got banned or whatever. Would the world be a better place? Sometimes I wonder if the answer to this would be yes.
You may be right. But there is a good aspect to social media - for example, I own a very rare vehicle, with less than ~1,400 made in the 90s (and who knows how many are left). Before social media, we were all isolated from each other, but now we exchange a lot of advice and tips for upkeep and repairs. It has been a lot of help.
A friend of mine uses reddit to keep up with small sub for people with a specific medical condition. Nowhere else was she able to find that kind of support or information.
That’s the great side of social media - connecting people who were otherwise isolated (mostly because of geography). I don’t know if these benefits outweigh the costs, though.
My opinion is it would be better in some ways and worse in others. I think it’s worth striving for some Star-Trek-esque version of humanity, where we are well and truly post-scarcity and have outgrown many/most of our more toxic traits as a species, and I think globalisation is the only way to achieve anything close to that.
I also acknowledge that to believe that end result is a certainty rather than a possibility is completely naive. I guess it’s a matter of opinion if the risk that we either wipe ourselves out on the way to that goal, or we just literally can’t overcome tribalism and greed, is worth chancing it.
Either way we’re probably too far gone! I have seen interesting studies here or there though, that indicate the current generation of new parents are far more aware of the dangers of such a technologically enriched lifestyle for children, and that things are turning back in the other direction. So who knows.
I think it’s worth striving for some Star-Trek-esque version of humanity
Every succeeding generation is wiser and more informed than the previous one. So, eventually, we will get there. Perhaps in centuries or millennia but humanity will get there… if we manage to not nuke ourselves.
Are you telling me my mom is full of boobs
For the mom is heavy and full of boobs
Is there really a bot problem on Lemmy? It really doesn’t feel that way, but I know that facts =/= feelings.
NO THERE IS NOT 🤖
Just what a bot would say!
They may be around, by ironically the lack of content shows they don’t post that much
…yet.
This belongs on a mug.
Thank god this isn’t a problem here
P░ U░S░S░ Y░I░ N░B░I░O ░
hey…
There’s no pussy in your bio…
😡
Just keep clicking. You’ll get to the malware eventually.
That’s why you ignore all comments from usernames that are like the default ones. Has been that way for a long time, tbh.
I feel really bad for this person.
Ah, I remember the reddit hug of death, from back when ordinary websites existed and got visitors, instead of just the same 25 mega corp sites that get linked now.
Don’t forget that CDNs have helped a lot with 🤗
Reddit perma banned for criticizing Israel
Not just Reddit every website I go to now I see this. Even on official game forums like World of Warcraft. Using to promote content or advertise in a way that tries to be organic.
My favorite are the YouTube comments saying to follow Jesus or whatever regardless of the actual content of the video. Who is that even for? LOL
Have you watched any sporting events recently. Some Christian group is willing to pay millions of dollars for a 30 second “Look at this puppy. Pretty great, right? Jesus. He loves puppies, too” ad spots.
I have to assume that we’re just dealing with people who have way more money than sense, and this is literally the best they can come up with in terms of evangelism.
My favorite is the comment I see on 80% of videos: “Upvote if you came here from Tik Tok”
Clearly, the algorithm thinks you need Jesus.
It has seen your search history and is worried for your soul.
Most likely those “Mega” Churches. If you post proof or call it out watch yourself get spam reported. I have gotten reported and temp banned when the bots abuse the automated systems. I know a few devs and they are scared that they can’t keep ahead of trying to ID and remove Ai like this.
My mechanical keyboard people haven’t really migrated over to Lemmy, so I after I stopped posting to Reddit (I still lurk… sue me) I signed onto a couple of legacy forums. A few months ago, one forum had a poster ask about a sketchy email he got from a vendor asking them to mention their keyboard X number of times, and didn’t even have to be uniformly positive, as long as he didn’t completely shit on them. They needed the visibility. He seemed iffy and I think decided against it, not least of which was that the payment was, IIRC, a free keyboard.
Not two days later, a veteran poster on the other forum magically mentions this obscure and unremarkable vendor, and while they’re qualified in their praise, they sure spent a lot of time talking about them. I was about to call it out, but then I just thought, “well hell, at least the company’s still using real people as shills. This is life now.”
This happens everywhere there, and if you complain the just say “you’re a bot!” Or “Reddit is for discussion” … place is a shithole
has someone reached out to u/A-Seashell to let them know they’ll never get an answer :’(
Reposts has always been a major issue on reddit, there are an infamous moderator who would delete posts with traction and repost it himself for karma.
Using bots to duplicate comments on reposts is a new low though.
Is it new? I got the impression that’s also been going on a while.
It’s definitely not a new issue, but it’s only gotten worse since reddit has gone more and more mainstream.
If you follow me on Lemmy since last year, you should know that I’ve always been extremely against having bots posting here.
I’ve always been extremely against having bots posting here.
As are all who live to see such times.
Except certain transparent bots that serve a clear, particular purpose. Like, we could have a bot that adds a new honorific to your description every time someone says, “oh hey, I saw a Margot Robbie on TV! Is that you?”
MargotRobbieHonorificBot: That’s Her Esteemed Greatness The GOAT Academy Award Deserver And Future Empress Of The High Seas Margot Robbie!
This bit is way funnier when it’s a real person saying it instead of a bot.
-insert [human] honorific string of adjectives here, on behalf of Margot Robbie.
What if it’s an actress, does that count? Or is it like, yeah, that’s just her character saying that.
I very much remember this being an issue a couple years ago
moderator who would delete posts with traction and repost it himself for karma
I’ve had this happen to me, it felt so fucking wrong lol. My thread got deleted by the mod and he reposted it as a sticky on his own name without so much mentioning me.
I had almost forgotten about him. Wouldn’t he also post obvious ads to the hundreds of communities he moderated, and bend the rules so that technically the posts belong?
Esteemed, world-renowned actress Margot Robbie?!
That’s esteemed Academy Award nominated (and incredibly humble) character actress Margot Robbie to you!
My apologies
You’re the second best character actor name Margo(t), but with Margo Martindale existing, being second is still a great achievement.
yep that’s really her
fuck reddit
Give them some credit. They’ve finally changed the user name generator to random words instead of Adjective_Noun_####.
They have not, left is the more recent post. The right one could be real and is just recreated by these bots.
I agree, credit retracted.
No, I think those comments are just unwitting humans walking into the simulation.
“It doesn’t look like anything to me.”
Adjective_Noun_#### are default generated by reddit, so they upgraded to their own generator at least it seems.
that’s pretty creepy
We use manual approval for programming.dev accounts where there is a very simple instruction you must follow to be approved. The amount of spam that fails that test makes me concerned about the amount of bots from instances without any barriers for account creation.
What happens on reddit (in regards to spam) will inevitably finds its way to ActivityPub link aggregators like lemmy.
I am sad that the current generation of federated social media/networks still doesn’t have much, if any, implementation of web of trust functionality. I believe that’s the only solution to bots/AI/etc content in the future. Show me content from people/accounts/profiles I trust, and accounts they trust, etc. When I see spam or scams or other misbehavior, show me the trust chain connecting me to it so I can sever it at the appropriate level instead of having to block individual accounts. (e.g. “sorry mom, you’ve trusted too many political frauds, I’m going to stop trusting people you trust”)
Yes! Web of trust is the only way. Everything else can be scammed. I am kinda wondering if it could be invites and if severing could be automated for social media. “We just banned a third person who came in on your invitations. Goodbye.”
Definitely something that will emerge in the future once we’ll inevitable get bots here too
I guess the question is how specifically you implement such a system, in this case for software like Lemmy. Should instances have a trust level with each other? Should you set a trust when you subscribe to a community? I’m not sure how you can make a solution that will be simple for users to use (and it needs to be simple for users, we can’t only have tech people on Lemmy).
I think that there would probably have to be some database, somewhere, to store that data?
For the simplest users, my initial idea is just a binary “do you trust them?” for each person (aka “friends”) and non-person (aka “follow”), and maybe one global binary of “do you trust who they trust?” that defaults to yes. anything more complex than that can be optional.
But how does this work when you follow communities? Do you need to trust every single poster in a community?
You’d see posts in a community/group/etc based on your trust of the community, unless you’ve explicitly de-trusted the poster or you trust someone who de-trusts them (and you haven’t broken that chain).
Right, so if I have no connection to someone else, it’d be “neutral” and I’d see the post. If I trust them transitively, then it would be a trusted post and if I distrust them transitively, it would be a distrusted post.
I think implementing such a thing would not only be complicated but also quite computationally demanding - I mean you’d need to calculate all of this for every single user?
That sounds smart!
That would be awesome, cause you would still be able to see your mom’s post!
I think this would be a great feature request: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues
I would definitively use it if it was implemented. Make it work like it is in GPG, where you can rank users based on your trust, and that is then propagated to others.
This concept reminds me of a certain browser extension that marks trans allies and transphobic accounts/websites using a user aggregate with thresholds that mark transphobes as red and trans allies as green.
Honestly I already believe that this has happened.
My reason for thinking this is because of this:
The spike that happened on October 2023 after the initial spike that happened due to the Reddit protests seems unnatural to me.
Someone gave the explanation of the release of the mobile clients but even then I wouldn’t think it would lead to a spike equivalent to the initial one since it would mostly just be people using an account they already had instead of creating a new one.
Like honestly if someone knows what event happened then that made so many new users join I’d appreciate it.
Newer user here… the api stuff got me to delete my reddit account but still surf it, it was the day of the IPO that i created my lemmy account…
That happened in March 2024 I think. And Reddit filed for the IPO in December 2023.
https://www.reuters.com/markets/deals/reddit-seeks-launch-ipo-march-sources-2024-01-18/
The day it IPOd on the market was my final day not the day of filing… I was holding out hope it wouldn’t happen lol…
Fair enough
Welcome! Let us know if you have any question.
Welcome new person, best start brushing up on beans and jeans if you want to survive.
Is that just accounts in total or active accounts?
I didn’t comment much in the beginning.
Now I try to comment at least once a day.
accounts in total.
Wait, then how would it go down? Are people deleting their accounts that much?
Apparently. But it seems like it only happened around the beginning after the second spike it stabilized for some reason.
Okay then I will admit, it does seem fishy.
Entire instances disappear as well.
I didn’t get into Lemmy until there was a mobile client available, Sync to be specific. I believe it since a lot of Reddit users were basically mobile only. So, for a few months I basically subsisted on YouTube alone.
Sync came out in August tho, I used Connect in the meantime lol
Sync is only one of many clients. And when it came out wasn’t the point of my post. But if no big clients came out in October then they couldn’t have been a factor at all.
That is sorta my point, I don’t know how much mobile app releases factored in to the spike back up in October. It probably did have some effect though
.
Is your issue with Sync or with the current state of the fediverse?
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