Aielman15@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
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%.
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.
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.
Poem_for_your_sprog
There are some things i miss about that site.
Poem_for_your_sprog
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Arcane2077@sh.itjust.works 10 hours ago
That’s just the consequence of being popular. Lemmy isn’t impervious or even resistant to this
real_squids@sopuli.xyz 10 hours ago
And of insanely easy account creation. You didn’t even need an email.
commie@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 hours ago
Reddit doesn’t require email either.
real_squids@sopuli.xyz 9 hours ago
I was talking about reddit. Lemmy, at least the instances i was on, needs manual approval
piyuv@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
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
ExLisper@lemmy.curiana.net 10 hours ago
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.
Korhaka@sopuli.xyz 1 hour ago
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.
carotte@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 hours ago
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, the problem keeps happening.
Die4Ever@retrolemmy.com 9 hours ago
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.
groet@feddit.org 8 hours ago
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.
Aielman15@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
Oh, absolutely. Which is why I avoid popular social media: you just end up drowning in AI/botted content.