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Bots everywhere or am I losing it?
(slrpnk.net)
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this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2025
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Ask Lemmy
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To me, all of the fediverse feels just the same as the platforms they set out to replace. Mastodon nowadays is like 50% bots and 50% stupid people, like twitter, just a slightly different echochamber. Lemmy feels the same as reddit to me, also echochamber-y and botty, just more dead (as in less people). Very frustrating. The german memes here are fire, though.
So-called "social" networks can have three main issues: technical (they have to work), leadership (they have to not be dickhead), and users (they also have to not be dickheads).
The first point can be handled with competent people, consensus, open source contributors, etc. (assuming no dictatorial management).
The second point can probably be handled by having a handful of decent people, transparency, accountability.
The third point, which is basically the thing that makes the content on the service… is still people. If people were obnoxious on twitter, they'll be obnoxious on bluesky, mastodon, and whatever else shows up. It's almost inevitable.
It's also why decent moderations tools are needed, which brings the question of how to do decent moderations tools that are not too extremet but still remains useful. This is not an easy task (and to my knowledge, there's no general solution to that).
Bots showing up is just the icing on the top. Without a pretty aggressive vetting system for accounts, there's not much that can be done from the service itself.
Given the general ambiance, I guess smaller community and services tailored for them might come back, the way we had tons of different forums back in the days. It might be a good solution; some form of SSO across many services to make people reachable, but no general, shared stream of messages as we have now.
tl;dr: it's not a technical problem, it's a people problem. So it won't be solved by technical solutions.
You can't ignore the technical factors. The reddit model is fundamentally a sort machine. The voting and temporal mechanism means reddit style platforms are always sorting for whatever the outcome ends up being. It's not the popular opinion nor the correct one. It's been proven time and again that the machine is easily gamed. Be early to engage with certain types of content and you're guaranteed to dominate the top of the sort.
What we have are not naive social networks. We've arrived at some kind of simulacra. In attempting to "digitize the world" we created a mirror of real life discussion. The mirror has tarnished over time. Distorted and by now taken on a form of itself.
It's a people problem alright. At times people seem to be playing some kind of social media game. Quite often especially on reddit people say things in ways you never hear people talk in real life. It's bizarre.
For example making up scenarios to be angry about. What is even that??? When they have the crowd on their side then everyone is in on the game too. A rational commenter can say, "That's not possible. This scenario is completely fabricated." But it's too late. Everyone is upset and communally partaking in the original commenters rumination.
This is a human problem but one that was arrived at by the technical design of social media nudging people into very weird forms of socialization. It's like people don't know how to be normal anymore.