this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2023
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Looking at the tracker comments seem to reaching parity with posts again, as they were pre-blackout. For the two days of the protest 67% of subs were private, yet posts hardly deviated from the norm - and comments only slightly below. Is the implication that people in subs that didn't join in like r/news etc just posted/commented that much more in a show of support ha ha ha, or is this a de facto admission that much of the site's traffic is just bots? Are investors down with that? I haven't seen this actually hashed out in discussions much.
I think more realistic implication is that big chunk of reddit content is bots and propagandists.
I was wondering about how much of reddit activity is bots. Are bot posts/comments possible with lemmy?
It's impossible to tell how much of the posts are bots but if you look at the default subreddits I'd say that it's definitely noticable.
Reddit is a popular grey marketing area - be it shilling products or political propaganda. Lemmy/Federation hasn't reached enough mass for this to be a real problem yet but it'll happen eventually and Lemmy is an easy target right now. I used to work in bot detection area and modern, well made bots (the ones you should worry about) are essentially indisguishable from real users but script kiddies can be an issue too.
The only real way to fight bots is to reduce the incentive which is more of a cultural thing - people have to call out shills and a more transparent platform definitely helps.
Sorry for the rant but I think bots/spam will play a big role if federation ever reaches the point where there's enough eye-balls for shilling to be valuable.
Good perspectives, I totally agree it’ll be a big challenge here as the fediverse gets bigger. Mastodon’s already had a couple of waves of spam - Brian Krebs had a good article a few weeks ago
I dunno, there's a particular instance here in the fediverse that seems like an alt-right bot operation. I don't want to mention it directly to avoid the ire of said community, but once you find it your Head might explode.
I'm certain lemmygrad is a propaganda operation by China or Russia. Well at least I want to believe that people aren't that toxic and ignorant.
There has to be a way to limit these accounts. Perhaps ban accounts with inhumane levels of activity? If possible, this would be awesome. I think that's what makes a platform for me - interacting with real humans on topics of mutual interest. It would be such a bonus to have a feed not dominated by bot reposts and inevitable drivel.
Behavior analysis is definitely a popular way to handle this but it's very difficult and resource intensive. Major issue is false positives as users are hard to predict in flexible environments like forums - is this person interested in all Honda posts as they are researching their new car purchase or they're shilling for Honda?
It's tough.