• SGforce@lemmy.ca
    89·
    27 days ago

    Such an inefficient way to astroturf. Just copy old comments and markov-chain basic shit. Reddit has been mostly bots for years and years.

      • TaviEnglish
        11·
        26 days ago

        Too hard. Have an LLM summarize each comment in an old comment chain so that it obliterates any meaning and burries any real engagement. (I have no evidence, but I think Reddit is scraping external sites and turning posts into comment chains)

    • dorkynsnacks@piefed.socialEnglish
      17·
      27 days ago

      So far there’s no money to be made here. Influence and reach is also limited.

      If that changes at some point, it might be the end of the Fediverse. It’s far too open to bots. A spammer can not only easily create new accounts on instances, they can run their own instances.

      • zabadoh@ani.social
        9·
        27 days ago

        Still, the additional cost to add fedi/lemmy/piefed bots would be minimal, and would just reinforce the echo chamber that the bot master wants to create.

      • pkjqpg1h@lemmy.zipEnglish
        2·
        25 days ago

        and if that instance start spamming I’ll ban them in 30 seconds, You should learn more about Fediverse

    • Bristlecone@lemmy.world
      10·
      27 days ago

      That’s true to a certain extent, but I think the fediverse isn’t all that attractive to these types of people. Additionally I think we are way better prepared to handle mass bot bans and detection since we aren’t as whorish here in the fediverse

      • rbos@lemmy.caEnglish
        7·
        27 days ago

        The ratio of human admins to users is better too, I think that will work in our favour.

  • chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    61·
    27 days ago

    Reddit has shown through its actions that it’s more interested in banning real users than bots, and wants to protect bots from being identified and called out by users, so it’s not that surprising they’ve been able to do this.

  • OwOarchist@pawb.socialEnglish
    46·
    27 days ago

    And yet I get constantly shadowbanned there just for using a VPN…

    I think reddit likes bots more than it likes real users.

    • x00z@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      26 days ago

      Bots nowadays use residential proxy networks. When people use a free VPN or other shady software, they might become part of the network, and bad actors can route traffic trough their devices.

      • Mubelotix@jlai.lu
        1·
        25 days ago

        It’s quite hard to buy residential proxies though. Almost every company selling them cheats and lies on the product, and the ips they have are absolute garbage as many people ruined their reputation already

  • aesthelete@lemmy.world
    46·
    26 days ago

    The days of having arguments with Internet strangers and knowing they aren’t a bot are officially over. It’s hard to tell exactly when the period ended, but it’s definitely done now.

    • demizerone@lemmy.world
      15·
      27 days ago

      I did that only twice and it never did it again. Arguing with people on the internet is pointless to begin with.

    • sheogorath@lemmy.world
      6·
      26 days ago

      Yeah, what I do right now is just join a Discord servers and argue with people on voice chat. YMMV tho, I accidentally made some lifelong friends this way.

    • pkjqpg1h@lemmy.zipEnglish
      3·
      25 days ago

      No bro LLMs are not that smart, maybe some low IQ Reddit/TikTok people can’t see the difference but We do

    • hector@lemmy.today
      2·
      26 days ago

      Plus chatbots now are getting more sophisticated, the government sponsored influence operations have the newest generation chatbots too, Israel of course the main one, but other subjects as well, like hyping the US military after the venezuela operation, which was in fact a military coup, the US made a deal with their generals to stand down and give up a few loyalist units and the presidente in exchange for the military being the de facto ruler, civilian government puppets now. Helicopters are vulnerable to weapons systems the army couldn’t take our reliably without an agreement to stand down, not the least in one of the most protected places in the country when mobilized.

      But after that operation, when they were pretending the US did it under the nose of the military and not in cooperation with them, as they were threatening Cuba and Colombia, and Canada and Denmark, and Iran, and Yemen, et al, their chatbots and influence agents were running wild, entire divisions of mechanized trolls and chatbots. It was not subtle. Argue with them too much they will mass flag you and reddit will side with them, not you.

      Despite us being the ones that drive use, and the bots and agents making a less enjoyable, less useful, and less used site. They don’t care, they can’t see past the next set of financial statements. Bots inflate their numbers, and the government and powerful interests can jam them up if they don’t lick their boots and pretend to believe them, ban the users they tell them to, etc.

      They figure we have no where else to go, so they don’t have to cater to us anyway. Let’s make them wrong about that.

  • LiveLM@lemmy.zipEnglish
    43·
    26 days ago

    Everyone is cooked, you are all cooked

    Thanks for making the problem worse, fuck you too man.

  • arcine@jlai.lu
    34·
    25 days ago

    AI Bros were really like “Reddit is one of our very few sources of usable data. What if we poisoned it too ? 🤪”

    Way to go guys ! Have fun with your degenerate data sets, and the resulting consanguine models that are 100% unusable as a result 😘

  • Bytemeister@lemmy.worldEnglish
    21·
    26 days ago

    This guy just openly admitted to shitting in the global punch bowl.

    It would really be a shame if someone everyone sent an army of bots to antagonize him at every waking moment of the day.

  • luciferofastora@feddit.org
    14·
    25 days ago

    I sometimes wonder how prevalent bots are on Lemmy. On one hand, the barrier for entry might be lower / the effectiveness of bans harder to gauge. On the other, I’d think we’re a smaller target, less attractive as a target.

    Either way, the potential to accuse dissenters of being bots or paid actors is a symptom of the general toxicity and slop spilling all over the internet these days. A (comparatively) few people can erode fundamental assumptions and trust. Ten years ago, I would’ve been repulsed by the idea of dehumanising conversational opponents that way (which may have been just me being more naive), but today I can’t really fault anyone.

    In terms of risk assessment (value÷effort), I’m inclined to think something with the reach of Ex-Twitter or reddit would be a more lucrative target, and most people here actually are people—people I disagree with, maybe, but still a human on the other side of the screen. Given the niche appeal, the audience here may overall be more eccentric and argumentative, so it’s easy to mistake genuine users for propaganda bots instead of just people with strong convictions.

    But I hate that the question is a relevant one in the first place.

    • Goodman@discuss.tchncs.de
      8·
      25 days ago

      We are the web. There is no web without the we.

      It is ultimately humans who add value to the internet. We can make decisions, take action, have bank accounts, bots for the most part still can’t. If we keep growing, there will come a time where swaying opinions, impressing advertisements or driving dissent will reach that value/effort threshold, especially with the effort term shrinking more everyday

      I think that we are genuinely witnessing the end of the internet as we know it and if we want meaningful online contact to persist after this death, then we should come up with ways that communities can weather the storm.

      I don’t know what the solution is, but I want to talk and think about it with others that care.

      On the individual level we can maybe fortify against the reasons that might make someone want to extract that value.

      • Being a principled conscious consumer makes you a less likely target for advertisement
      • Avoid ragebait and clickbait, and develop a good epistemic bullshit filter along with media literacy, this makes it more difficult to lie to you, or to provoke outrage.
      • Unfortunately, be selective with your trust. How old is the user account? are the posting hours normal? does the user come across as a genuine human being that values discussion and meaningful online contact?
      • Be authentic and genuine. I don’t know how else to signify that I am real (shoutout to the þorn users)

      I would love to hear what others think.

      • luciferofastora@feddit.org
        3·
        25 days ago

        are the posting hours normal?

        Hey, no judging my sleep schedule arbitrary times when biological necessity triumphs over all the fun things I could do while awake!

        Serious reply:

        On the individual level we can maybe fortify against the reasons that might make someone want to extract that value.

        On the collective level, we should do something about the mechanisms that incentivise that malicious extraction of value in the first place, but that’s a whole different beast…

        Being a principled conscious consumer makes you a less likely target for advertisement

        Agreed, though we should also stress that “less likely” or “unlikely” doesn’t mean “never” and that we’re not immune against being influenced by ads. That’s a point I’ve seen people in my social circles overlook or blatantly ignore when pointed out, hence me emphasising it.

        media literacy

        This is probably one of the most critical deficits in general. Even with the best intentions, people make mistakes and it’s critical to be aware of and able to compensate that.

        Unfortunately, be selective with your trust.

        Same as media literacy, I feel like this is a point that would apply even in a world where we’re all humans arguing in good faith: Others may have a different, perhaps limited or flawed perspective, or just make mistakes — just as you yourself may overlook things or genuinely have blind spots — so we should consider whose voice we give weight in any given matter.

        On the flipside, we may need to accept that our own voice might not be the ideal one to comment on something. And finally, we need to separate those issues of perspective and error from our worth as persons, so that admitting error isn’t a shame, but a mark of wisdom.

        Be authentic and genuine

        That’s the arms race we’re currently running, isn’t it? Developers of bots put effort into making them appear authentic—I overheard someone mention that their newest model included an extra filter to “screw up” some things people have come to consider indicators of machine-generated texts, such as these dashes that are mostly used in particular kinds of formal writing and look out of place elsewhere.

        If at all, people tend to just use a hyphen instead - it’s usually more convenient to type (unless you’ve got a typographic compulsion to go that extra step because that just looks wrong). And so the dev in question made their model use less dashes and replace the rest with hyphens to make the text look more authentic.

        I wanted to spew when I heard that, but that’s beside the point.

        So basically, we’d have to constantly be running away from the bots’ writing style to set ourselves apart, even as they constantly chase our style to blend in. Our best weapon would be the creative intuition to find a way of phrasing things other humans will understand but bots won’t (immediately) be able to imitate.

        Being creative on demand isn’t exactly a viable solution, at least not individually, and coordinating on the internet is like harding lolcats, but maybe we can work together to carve out some space for humanity.

        • Goodman@discuss.tchncs.de
          2·
          25 days ago

          Thanks for your comments. I agree with everything you said especially that these traits are desirable for broader life IRL. In a way the web culture is a reflection of our own cultures just more mixed, extreme, amplified and with a good dose of parasociallity. I desperately want people to break free of their cycles. Think, talk, discuss, empathize and form communities, use your free will for good damit. These are the real antidotes that will enable the cultural shift that will allow us to reject the smothering of the human spirit in the current way of life.

          Anyways, it is a terrible thing that there is an armsrace to be authentic. This really ought to be solved on the user registration side. And also yes, saying something profound with hidden meaning through creative intuition is great, I write poems sometimes. But its not the solution to authenticity online.