I love how so many people on Reddit are acting like this is a complete shock. That site has been a cesspool of bots and targeted ads for years now, people still believed they were having real conversations with humans? I’d be surprised if legit content was higher than 50%.
They can literally setup an instance themselves. By the time it is identified as such, the damage is basically done. Just make a new one. Or use one of the many instances not requiring approval. Or fill out the form with ai. They don’t actually need an insane number of accounts for their subterfuge. Having just “some” and keeping them tied to conversational themes/topics seems sufficient?
I’d argue it is resistant. Lemmy is federated, which means smaller instances, making it easier to detect this kind of activity. Crime in a city vs crime in a town situation
Nah, it works for now because no one really tries to spam lemmy. If it gets popular enough companies will pay bot farms to post here and admins want be able to keep up with moderation. Bots will simply join the biggest instances. The only solution would be to defederate the main instances and have everyone pretty much host their own server.
look at Mastodon and it’s practically what’s happening there. bot farms don’t even bother setting up their own servers, they just go to mastodon.social (by far the largest instance) and bot from there. and because .social refuses to have manual approval for each account, and many instances don’t want to defenerate from where almost everyone is, the problem keeps happening…
I think to an extent yes, but not quite as bad as Reddit. Reddit admins will completely ignore reports about these. I think most Fediverse admins won’t ignore them.
And if everybody hosts their own server, than so will the advertisers and everybody will have to defederate then individually making the problem of moderation even worse.
When it gets bad enough the default will switch from blacklists to whitelists and the user base will consolidate to fewer and fewer popular instances that are able to address the spam.
Bots will simply join the biggest instances. The only solution would be to defederate the main instances and have everyone pretty much host their own server.
the user base will consolidate to fewer and fewer popular instances that are able to address the spam.
But hosting servers cost real money so creating thousands of them may not be cost effective for spammers. Paywalls are the best defense against spammers. Of course this is all hypothetical. Self hosting will never be mainstream. Or maybe? 🤔
What if we make self hosting super easy? Like select the services you want to host, choose a domain, pay and bam, you’ve got your self hosted instance of lemmy/mastodon/pixelfed and so on?
There is at least one company that does provide managed Lemmy services (which makes sense, since a lot of people might want to run their own instance, but don’t want to deal with security and updates and setting up x.509 certs and stuff).
Hey dear community, we just launched today our fully managed hosting of Lemmy
We offer to do Deployment / Security / SSL / DNS / SMTP / Monitoring / Alerts / Backups / Automated updates / Handle migrations / Fully automated but with Human support :)
We deploy each instance on a dedicated VM, and we provide full root access as well if you want to customize anything.
Pricing start at $10/month (billed hourly, no contract)
Only $11.25/mo. Risk-free with a 14-day money-back guarantee
Those are the ones that come up in a search. They’re probably hoping that the Threadiverse will grow; enough instances could make writing scripts and whatever pretty worthwhile.
That really depends on the community. When I was there, I would avoid the larger communities and seek out smaller communities. When I first joined Reddit, it was to avoid the attention-seeking posts by humans, and near the end it was to avoid attention-seeking posts by bots and humans alike. The best content IMO is on subreddits with <100k subs and <5 posts per day.
Yeah, I suspect most of /r/prisonhooch is still legit content, but it is kinda a rejection of commercialism. Not much you could sell them. A fermenting tub? The fuckers will use a water butt instead.
There’s a way to look at the top Karma users on Reddit. Most of them are either bots, or corporate account. There’s a Marvel one that posts movie stuff, and some Turbo something or other for gaming. They don’t comment, they just post what their corporate overlords want you to see, and they probably have bots that push their content to the top. They just aggregate popular sites, though, driving people into the ads.
When I was on Reddit, going to that leaderboard to block people was my first stop. Though, I do think there are a few that are interesting, even bots — like the haiku one is amusing. It doesn’t always get it right, but it’s fun to see it try. Then there’s a guy — pretty sure it’s a person, at least — who turns posts into poems. Not quite the same. Got a weird name. Regular Redditors know who they are. “Something for your something”, I think. I don’t block the fun ones. Just the corporate trash.
Poem for your sprog. I had no problem with the novelty accounts, and even the bot accounts there were clearly just some dev with a quirky sense of humor. Though those got hate from the anti bot purists, for whatever stupid reason.
It’s the corporate, vote manipulating, spam, Russian propaganda etc bots that piss me off. And those are much more subtle and harder to detect.
As someone who never saw Instagram before yesterday, I was a little shocked at just how much crap was AI generated and just useless fake content. I kept hearing how bad AI was, but until I saw just how bad I really had no idea. I imagine reddit is getting closer to this exact model soon enough.
The big subs were full of bots, but for some it didn’t really matter. It a post was a bit but it was still funny on memes or funny then it’s fine. I don’t care if karma farming bots were the majority of posts so long as it’s still good content. The content does seem to be significantly worse now though.
I love how so many people on Reddit are acting like this is a complete shock. That site has been a cesspool of bots and targeted ads for years now, people still believed they were having real conversations with humans? I’d be surprised if legit content was higher than 50%.
That’s just the consequence of being popular. Lemmy isn’t impervious or even resistant to this
And of insanely easy account creation. You didn’t even need an email.
Reddit doesn’t require email either.
I was talking about reddit. Lemmy, at least the instances i was on, needs manual approval
They can literally setup an instance themselves. By the time it is identified as such, the damage is basically done. Just make a new one. Or use one of the many instances not requiring approval. Or fill out the form with ai. They don’t actually need an insane number of accounts for their subterfuge. Having just “some” and keeping them tied to conversational themes/topics seems sufficient?
I’d argue it is resistant. Lemmy is federated, which means smaller instances, making it easier to detect this kind of activity. Crime in a city vs crime in a town situation
Nah, it works for now because no one really tries to spam lemmy. If it gets popular enough companies will pay bot farms to post here and admins want be able to keep up with moderation. Bots will simply join the biggest instances. The only solution would be to defederate the main instances and have everyone pretty much host their own server.
Think I would agree there, small reddit communities are also going to be more resistant to it. Small hobbyist stuff probably one of the better ones.
look at Mastodon and it’s practically what’s happening there. bot farms don’t even bother setting up their own servers, they just go to mastodon.social (by far the largest instance) and bot from there. and because .social refuses to have manual approval for each account, and many instances don’t want to defenerate from where almost everyone is, the problem keeps happening…
I didn’t know that but it’s nice to know I was 100% right.
I think to an extent yes, but not quite as bad as Reddit. Reddit admins will completely ignore reports about these. I think most Fediverse admins won’t ignore them.
And if everybody hosts their own server, than so will the advertisers and everybody will have to defederate then individually making the problem of moderation even worse.
When it gets bad enough the default will switch from blacklists to whitelists and the user base will consolidate to fewer and fewer popular instances that are able to address the spam.
You spin me right round, baby, right round 🎶🎶
But hosting servers cost real money so creating thousands of them may not be cost effective for spammers. Paywalls are the best defense against spammers. Of course this is all hypothetical. Self hosting will never be mainstream. Or maybe? 🤔
No way, because posting on already-established corpo platforms is much less of a barrier to entry.
What if we make self hosting super easy? Like select the services you want to host, choose a domain, pay and bam, you’ve got your self hosted instance of lemmy/mastodon/pixelfed and so on?
There is at least one company that does provide managed Lemmy services (which makes sense, since a lot of people might want to run their own instance, but don’t want to deal with security and updates and setting up x.509 certs and stuff).
kagis
Might be elest.io that I’m remembering.
https://discuss.jacen.moe/post/862
https://elest.io/open-source/lemmy
Looks like there’s another one at least:
https://www.knthost.com/lemmy
Those are the ones that come up in a search. They’re probably hoping that the Threadiverse will grow; enough instances could make writing scripts and whatever pretty worthwhile.
Oh, absolutely. Which is why I avoid popular social media: you just end up drowning in AI/botted content.
It’s so bad, basically every post there is pushed by bots. The entire purpose of reddit is to shape opinion by forced consensus.
It’s a propaganda machine inside the bloated husk of a forum aggregator.
Lemmy isn’t impervious but it’s much better than reddit.
deleted by creator
That really depends on the community. When I was there, I would avoid the larger communities and seek out smaller communities. When I first joined Reddit, it was to avoid the attention-seeking posts by humans, and near the end it was to avoid attention-seeking posts by bots and humans alike. The best content IMO is on subreddits with <100k subs and <5 posts per day.
Yeah, I suspect most of /r/prisonhooch is still legit content, but it is kinda a rejection of commercialism. Not much you could sell them. A fermenting tub? The fuckers will use a water butt instead.
There’s a way to look at the top Karma users on Reddit. Most of them are either bots, or corporate account. There’s a Marvel one that posts movie stuff, and some Turbo something or other for gaming. They don’t comment, they just post what their corporate overlords want you to see, and they probably have bots that push their content to the top. They just aggregate popular sites, though, driving people into the ads.
When I was on Reddit, going to that leaderboard to block people was my first stop. Though, I do think there are a few that are interesting, even bots — like the haiku one is amusing. It doesn’t always get it right, but it’s fun to see it try. Then there’s a guy — pretty sure it’s a person, at least — who turns posts into poems. Not quite the same. Got a weird name. Regular Redditors know who they are. “Something for your something”, I think. I don’t block the fun ones. Just the corporate trash.
Oh, Poem for your Sprog. I remember that one. Users like that are one of the few things I miss about Reddit.
I’ve seen someone who took that username here in Lemmy, but that could be anyone, no guarantee that it was the same guy/gal on reddit
Poem for your sprog. I had no problem with the novelty accounts, and even the bot accounts there were clearly just some dev with a quirky sense of humor. Though those got hate from the anti bot purists, for whatever stupid reason.
It’s the corporate, vote manipulating, spam, Russian propaganda etc bots that piss me off. And those are much more subtle and harder to detect.
Poem_for_your_sprog
There are some things i miss about that site.
https://old.reddit.com/user/Poem_for_your_sprog/
That account appears to have been inactive for the past seven months.
Poem for your sprog, right? Not been on reddit for a while, but encountering a post from that guy was generally a fun moment.
As someone who never saw Instagram before yesterday, I was a little shocked at just how much crap was AI generated and just useless fake content. I kept hearing how bad AI was, but until I saw just how bad I really had no idea. I imagine reddit is getting closer to this exact model soon enough.
Most people are unable to tell the difference between human and bot and, to be honest, a significant percentage of humans are dumber than modern LLMs.
The big subs were full of bots, but for some it didn’t really matter. It a post was a bit but it was still funny on memes or funny then it’s fine. I don’t care if karma farming bots were the majority of posts so long as it’s still good content. The content does seem to be significantly worse now though.