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Digg’s open beta shuts down after just two months, blaming AI bot spam (www.theverge.com)
submitted 6 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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https://digg.com/

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[–] 66 points 6 months ago (17 children)

The only thing keeping the bot population low here is that there just aren't enough people here to be worth it yet. If the Fediverse grows they'll come in greater numbers.

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  • [–] 35 points 6 months ago (4 children)

    It's also not as SEO-gameable (since fediverse domains are inherently more fragmented than a large, high-reputation domain for SEO algorithms to rank highly), and doesn't have an inherent monetization system (unlike platforms like Twitter with their ad payouts), so that's a couple more things going for us.

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  • [–] 6 points 6 months ago (3 children)

    The only time I've even seen the fediverse pop up in a search was when I was doing some black magic nonsense getting Linux to do what I wanted. Yes it was a Linux community no it didn't help.

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  • [–] 19 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (2 children)

    The Fediverse has a lot more safeguards in place, in particular the ability to require a message to register an account, such as my instance requires, weeds out 99% of bots.

    We can also defederate from instances that become overwhelmed from bots if they have lax sign-up requirements (already happened a few times), which vastly limits their ability to take hold.

    The bigger problem for us, I think, is the fight against bot scrapers. Anubis is keeping them at bay for now, but it will likely be an ongoing cat and mouse game until the AI bubble bursts.

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  • [–] 4 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    the moderation and comment moderation history is nice but it is sort of hidden. that would be nicer if it was more intuitively inline. Also did you mean "bot scrapers" rather than "not scrapers". And I have been toying with the idea, what about ai or bot supported pipelines, accept that they are part of the visitors, provide it optimized data, and then restrict ui/ux heavy processes to stricter rate limits per second, etc...sort of like a robots txt v2 or something

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  • [–] 3 points 6 months ago

    It's less hidden for admins. Whenever we click on a user's profile, there's a button that can take us directly to their individual mod-log history, which can help us quickly see if there's a history of AI or bot spam behavior that was spotted by other admins/mods.

    Also did you mean “bot scrapers”

    Agh, auto correct got me. Yes, I meant bot scrapers.

    As for the robots.txt v2 idea, I'm not sure that would be very effective or popular amongst admins, as I think most would prefer not to give it any data if possible, and even with reduced rates, there would probably still be enough bots and queries to present a significant issue.

    I think there have been some experiments with 'trapping' bots in a recursive loop that they don't realize is a loop, and therefore can't escape, but I'm not sure how effective those have been.

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  • [+] -3 points 6 months ago (7 children)
    [removed by mod]
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  • [–] 15 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    For someone who likes digging around in my Reddit history you'd think you'd be able to find something that was actually relevant to the topic at hand. That was a comment about the uses of agentic coding tools for making custom applications, not about building bots.

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  • [–] 12 points 6 months ago

    Yeah, well, I judge you for participating in all those scat and cuck subreddits.

    DISCLAIMER: This is a joke. I haven't stalked them on reddit. Just being silly and want that to be clear. :)

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  • [–] 0 points 6 months ago (3 children)

    Fuck the anti-AI crowd is getting extreme. So much harassment and doxxing going on by these losers.

    And it’s not even relevant, using an LLM to vibecode apps is completely different to using LLMs to make posts on social media. Just blind rage.

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  • [–] -1 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    This particular user is a special kind of one. Once you make the wrong noises about something they don't like, they make it their personal mission to start digging for anything even remotely looking like dirt that they can sling your way - as they're now demonstrating below.

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