this post was submitted on 26 Nov 2024
61 points (95.5% liked)

Asklemmy

44149 readers
1389 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy ๐Ÿ”

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

  1. Open-ended question
  2. Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
  3. Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
  4. Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
  5. An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Am I just noticing them more now? It's like every other post now is a bot. Please don't tell me that lemmy is about to be like reddit where it's only bots that post anything at all

all 22 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[โ€“] FrostyTrichs@walledgarden.xyz 36 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (2 children)

Maybe your instance is federating with someone new that does a lot of bot posting? Sometimes all it takes is one person on the instance to join a very active bot community and next thing you know members are seeing a ton of new bot posts.

Editing to add- On Lemmy you can turn off viewing bot accounts completely in your account settings if you don't ever want to see them.

[โ€“] MimicJar@lemmy.world 6 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Re turning off bot accounts, keep in mind labeled bots probably serve a specific purpose. So turning off bots can result in a poorer user experience.

For example I have bot accounts that post weekly discussion threads for TV shows or discussion threads for films.

If you turn off all bots then you'll never see these discussion threads. (I've seen this happen, users starting a duplicate discussion thread because they hid all bot accounts.)

I would recommend blocking bot accounts you find annoying vs blocking all bots.

This is an excellent point. Thanks for taking the time to add this!

[โ€“] Rentlar@lemmy.ca 12 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

It could be instance-dependent. Do you have any example screenshots?

If there's one or two prolific posters you keep seeing and it's annoying to you, you can block them. If it's certain communities you can curate that for yourself too.

You can also "block all bots" (but the bot flag is generally self-reported). If you think that a bot is not reporting itself correctly (and it's not just a terminally online lemmy user) then you can report them to that instance.

[โ€“] EABOD25@lemm.ee 5 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

I was just scrolling and saw bot after bot. All with different names. I just when ahead and blocked all bots

Scrolling in what? All? I try to keep my subscriptions curated so I don't really see a lot of the bot communities, without needing to blanket block bots.

[โ€“] SnokenKeekaGuard@lemmy.dbzer0.com 12 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

I just have bots disabled on my account. I suggest you try that too

[โ€“] Akasazh@feddit.nl 5 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Only works with honest bots though

[โ€“] MimicJar@lemmy.world 5 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Which, funnily, are probably the bots you'd be fine seeing.

[โ€“] Akasazh@feddit.nl 3 points 3 weeks ago

Yup, that was my point

[โ€“] Grimy@lemmy.world 9 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

I think they were always there, it's that organic posts have gone down since the election is over and the ratio had changed.

[โ€“] eldavi@lemmy.ml 4 points 3 weeks ago

do you have examples of these bot posts? i don't think i've ever seen one.

[โ€“] chobeat@lemmy.ml 7 points 3 weeks ago

any public space that intermediates people attention is eventually going to be spam by bots, proportionally to the number of people present. Lemmy doesn't do much to avoid this. The public internet has no future and the fediverse should be building tools for federated community spaces rather than public spaces shaped in the image of attention-harvesting machines.

[โ€“] CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 6 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

On here? I haven't noticed, but with the lax admission procedures on some instances spammers, scammers and bots are kind of inevitable.

In the really long term you'll probably need an email address that needs a phone number that needs a physical address like everything else.

[โ€“] IDKWhatUsernametoPutHereLolol@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

I don't think people on Lemmy are too keen on requiring phone numbers... cuz privacy reasons...

[โ€“] CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

Yeah, I'd much prefer micropayments in crypto (I swear that's not just a string of buzzwords). HTTP even has codes built in for it, it just never took off because crypto and even paypal didn't exist yet back then.

If you have nothing you, you get a dead internet space. There's simply no reason for the mentioned people to not make endless sockpuppet accounts. That's why the meatspace -> phone -> email chain arose in the first place, without anyone ever designing it as far as I'm aware.

[โ€“] nokturne213@sopuli.xyz 5 points 3 weeks ago

The lemmy_news@lemmy.wtf bot is pretty prolific, but it seems to be a little tamer than its predecessor. It was originally on infosec.pub, but the admin there, Jerry banned it.

I see Zippybot quite a lot as well. And then there is the rss feeder bot, but after blocking all of the communities from that instance I hardly, if ever see it.

[โ€“] IDKWhatUsernametoPutHereLolol@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Bots on Lemmy have to be clearly marked as a bot, or get banned.

Most of the major instances have manual approval so bots are very unlikely to get through.

If you are wondering if a user is secrely a bot, just check the sign up page of their instance, if it requires an application, its probably not a bot.

[โ€“] spongebue@lemmy.world 2 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

What would stop a human from creating an account, then having a bot run it?

It makes it harder.

You can have hundreds of bots on reddit in an hour, and because Reddit is so mainstream, its easy for bots to blend in the millions of accounts out there.

On lemmy, applications often ask things like: Why did you decide to join lemmy?

But some ask harder questions like on lemmy.dbzer0.com it asks "Who is your favorite pirate, anarchist, or open source advocate" and "Write about a recent event in the past month".

I mean its not hard to write about this, but you have to make each account have a unique paragraph or you get sussed and denied.

So you can probably get a dozen account approved in an hour, but not like 900 accounts.

If your bot network starts to form a pattern, admins can get suspicious and ban you.

And if bots become a threat, admins can make the application questions more complex. Requiring you to spend more time to fill the application for each account.

Nothing is foulproof, is it makes it harder.

Like even if bots aren't an issue, there are still humans that operate sockpuppet accounts to push propaganda, and these aren't technically "bots" but a human with a network of sockpuppets can still be as dangerous as a bot network.