Me as an instance admin sitting here reading about how Lemmy doesn't have trolls and Russian bots, while I'm in a chat with other instance admins and mods where we need to actively coordinate to fight the trolls and Russian bots 😐
Thank you for your service! (sounds sarcastic, is not)
Yeah... OP is blind to the massive Kremlin and CCP propaganda problem here in the Fediverse.
After hexbear got defederated from most of the major instances, the fucking losers just make alts on different instances so they can continue defending that propaganda filled shithole. Now .ml seems like the new worst, no matter what you do these no-life losers will find a way to spread their bullshit.
Takes much more effort to try and stop them than it does for these losers to make alts unfortunately.
I was under the impression that the .ml admins actually promote them because it's run by people from Hexbear.
It's a bit more mask on, and there's a few legit communities there, as opposed to Hexbear where the entire instance has a stated goal.
But it's pretty bad.
Ml is run by the creators of Lemmy, and hexbear is well... Not. Hexbear made their own fork of lemmy a long time ago and only in the past year or so have they been actually able to federate at all. I don't see the creators of Lemmy going through all that effort to hide their identities if they were actually running hexbear behind the scenes
Confusing the bear with 'grad
Hexbear wasn't federated to begin with for many instances, and Lemmy.ml hasn't really changed as a result of Hexbear getting defederated by servers like Lemmy.world and Lemmy.ca, because Hexbear has a more secluded user-base. Hexbear intentionally tries to be careful with who they federate with.
They're not just some losers sitting on their mom's basements, they're paid or programmed to spread disinformation and division.
By a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.
Welcome to IT. If everything is on fire, they ask why you’re even here, and if everything is ready for the fire and there’s nothing left to do, they also ask why you’re even here
I'm yet to see any in the last year personally, so I guess it's working?
That's honestly pretty amazing that you've been here a year and haven't seen a troll! Though you're on an instance with a very active and determined admin, there is definitely a difference in how much you see between instances because of how removals work.
picking the right instance seems to be half the battle for users
You guys are pretty proactive about blocking and defederating bad faith instances, or even ones not doing enough to deal with bad actors. You were one of the first to defederate Hexbear, and I think you even defederated world at one point?
Wtf. Why didn't you mention the cringe lord emperor striker?!
Edit: using my mod powers to get attention.
Leaching on to mod powers to grab attention, for what purpose, I do not know.
To prevent the all powerful cum tsunami from wiping us all out
Nah, that one seems too funny to miss
Put me in the screenshot
Not me though thanks
The elon musk mindset. Lmao
Thank you god-modereor for showing us the way... By force!
Goderator?
Don't give them any ideas!
Can any mere man wield such ferocious, blinding power?
A terrifyingly, beautiful thing to behold. But only just a glance.
I'm scared, feel like... like an Upper Neolithic man witnessing Nikolai Tesla inside his Faraday cage, as the bright blue electric current crackles and arches all around him.
Well except for the entire population of Hexbear and the 'Grad...
I'm fairly sure they aren't bots, but definitely pro Russia.
bots, sockpuppets, infowarfare it's all different vlads in the same bag
Last I checked hexbear had something like 70% more total comments than lemmy.world despite only having a tiny fraction of the users. Sounds like bots to me
Hexbear has had an established and more active community for a longer time than Lemmy.world. You can visit Hexbear yourself and check, it's not illegal or anything.
Over time Lemmy.world may overtake Hexbear, but not for a while.
I have imagined that ever since the Reddit emigration hype ended and things settled down a bit here that the vast majority of world and shit users are mostly lurkers and not terribly vocal, as is the case on a lot of other platforms.
Well Hexbear also had a policy of not showing down votes to encourage users to respond if they disagree instead of just down voting and moving on.
That's very ironic given that they ban anyone further left than "Capitalist Russia is the best country in the world! Let's support their invasion of Ukraine for no reason! Ughur genocide fake by the way! Is not so bad that Stalin banned being gay."
It's not that they don't show downvotes only, you literally cannot downvote on Hexbear.
Plus whenever somebody talks ill about the CCP over there they get barraged by copypasta responses. Their posts mirror popular posts on other servers, and generally lack any form of real discussion. The place looks like the bottiest of all instances and nothing can change my mind.
A lot of troll accounts are semi-automated. They run a script that detects certain keywords, and posts premade replies to them (nowadays said premade replies are being finetuned with generative AI to look less uniform), also a human is watching over them to ensure both correct operation and to overtake in case of emergency.
Source: My father's ex-girlfriend's ex-boyfriend was (is) a paid online troll for Fidesz. They also had Discord (later Matrix if I recall) servers for organizing mass reports, downvotes, angry/haha react campaigns, often they also did some "private doxxing".
Seems like a rock solid source making claims that are definitely falsifiable.
And large parts of .ml, which is the bridge for hexbear to all the instances which defederated with them.
It really does feel like hexbear users are probably high fiving each other over their cubicle walls in Vladivostok. The admin openly states their goal is information warfare.
I'm convinced those people have to be elaborate trolls. Like the flat earthers.
nah - they are very real. Maybe sock puppets but real. I imagine them like rich 15 year old kids beeing “rad and cool”
Idk ozma was pushing a super hard the left should protest vote or not vote before getting called out in every thread. They have been slowly evolving the shill to be less and less obvious. Even started posting memes and other content to try and get the political agenda across without posting negative articles. Now the message isnt the very obvous up front don't vote, but they are just "critical of Biden," yet have nothing to say about anyone else. Doesn't seem like an edgy kid to me.
Linkerbaan is similar but hasn't evolved yet. Still an obvious shill.
He definitely is not. He's a grifter that parrots a lot of right wing nut job conspiracy theories like anti-vaxxing. He's a Liberal at most.
There is a user named JimmyDoreIsALefty who constantly posts bait and argues in the comments of it.
Sinister as shit.
Ok, so I'm not the only one who noticed that their spam has a weird taste to it. It's got that vibe of some agreeable left-wing content but then feels likes it only there to mask authoritarian narrative building.
I'm glad I'm not the only one. That account is truly bizarre (from the point of view of how they write and express themselves). I've engaged with them a few times and it's like a weird loop. I know it's a real person, but it feels like talking to a script or dialog tree because it always goes down the same 1-2 dialog paths
I think it’s a bot assisted human. The amount of spam they output is inhuman but they do interact like a human at times.
Even without any karma system, interacting with the users here is a breath of fresh air. Lemmy has the least shills and bots compared to the poison in most other platforms. It's currently Lemmy's best asset and where it stands out from all existing social media imo, and I hope it remains this way.
They’re certainly easier to avoid.
Lemmy has the least shills and bots
Because it's not popular yet. Wait until it becomes so and the inevitable enshittification happens.
Enshittification isn't what happens when something becomes popular, it's what happens to disruptive tech and commodities that get increasingly fine-tuned for profit after competition inevitably floods in. It's a product of monetization.
Lemmy is FOSS so that won't happen, plus you can splinter off into your own walled garden instance like Beehaw if you want.
You make it sound like monetization can't happen on a FOSS platform. Bots are a form of monetization, it's just not by the people who created and control the platform.
As it gets popular, bots will come for the purpose of creating an audience and monetizing them.
That's true, but it's just not enshittification because it's not done by the platform itself. It's a different word.
Hmmm interesting. I was under the impression that enshitification was "making something shittier in the pursuit of (eg) greed", I didn't realize that it only applies to when the creator (controller? owner?) of the thing does it.
Has it always been used for this specific case? If so, what is the word for the more general case I described?
It sounds like a really specific definition, but you'd be surprised by how often it applies. He originally thought of it to apply to Tik Tok after noticing it following a similar pattern as Facebook, Amazon, and I think Google. Then the internet realized it could keep applying his term to so many more companies, like Spotify, Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, Reddit, Microsoft, Apple, all streaming companies, and even physical product companies like car companies or John Deere, etc and it's shot up in popularity and use since then.
Not sure of the general use case you describe, but the person who invented the term in that article I linked sounds like he doesn't mind if it's used in a more general case for things getting worse from greed, so feel free to go ahead and keep using it I guess lol. Although maybe we should come up with a different, more general term for that if there isn't already one? I've got nothing, but if anyone has suggestions lol.
Ey used the wrong word, but this in fact is correct. Once lemmy gets popular, bot farms will definitely will siege it, and the amount of "bots and shills" will rise
Have we forgotten that we also have Margot Robbie?
I think that she prefers "Academy Award-nominated character actor, and producer Margot Robbie".
Star of the Barbie movie, now available on Blu Ray at your local retailers!
Are you saying that she's a bot or a troll?
I'm saying she's an academy award nominated character actor and producer
On the internet, no one knows if you're A̶u̶s̶t̶r̶a̶l̶i̶a̶n̶ Academy Award winning actress Margot Robbie.
I’d estimate blocking ozma has reduced the amount of “Trump and the GOP may be attempting to install a fascist dictatorship but Biden’s old” nonsense in my feed by 95%.
I've blocked both of them, as well as the politicalmemes community and my Lemmy experience has gotten so much better.
Ozma got banned from politicalmemes recently and it's 1000% better for it
The tragic thing, though, is that if lemmy ever "takes off", there's nothing about it that will make it any more resistant to bots and trolls.
It's kinda like back when Macs had no viruses, because nobody bothered.
I disagree. Lemmy is more resistant to bots because there’s no perverse incentive to boost user activity numbers to please investors and advertisers. Reddit for example doesn’t really care if most comments are fake on a post. It’s still interaction and it pumps numbers. Lemmy is built and run by us. It serves no other masters.
Given that users naturally self-sort into instances, your trolls are also more likely to congregate on instances and communities that can be blocked. I don’t want to name any names but I do block some instances from my view for a reason. The Russian bots congregate in places that are amenable to this, and the design of Lemmy encourages this self-sorting into places where you’re accepted.
The problem is still significant, but there are advantages to the fediverse.
I think it would be more likely bots would flood instances with posts at a level that was unrealistic for the small scale admins we currently have to combat.
There is a bit of a chain of trust, however. Instance fills with spam bots? Defed.
Spam bots start making their own instances? Go to whitelists.
And as henfredemars says, because there is no financial incentive to grow the userbase, instances can slow things right down if the spam starts.
nah, descentralisation is what help, i already read as article explaining exactly that, lemmy problem is that one of it first instances are full of trolls lol
Not only that, but it's actually a much easier target because of the relatively sporadic moderation.
Compared to reddit, the Fediverse's ability to moderate propaganda and advertising is puny and uncoordinated.
Hard disagree. I'm already spending less time here because the Kremlin and CCP propaganda ruins the experience for me. I don't even consider recommending it to people I know for the same reason.
You can block Instances that like those, or switch to and instance where the admins do it on an instance level.
Eh just block the tankie instances. That problem goes away quickly!
Just because I'm not seeing these comments and posts doesn't mean other people aren't. And if they're seeing it, then they'll get seduced by the evil tankie mind-control rays. That means I've got to start blocking them, too.
Pretty soon, I'll be in this shrinking walled garden of fewer and fewer people who say things I approve of. And then what?! I might begin to question my own self-righteousness or engage in some degree of critical reflection of views. That'll be it. They'll have gotten to me, too!
The whole Lemmy.world community needs to be severed from any instance of heresy. Otherwise, my personal views might be put at risk.
Uphold Lemmy.world Thought
Just because I'm not seeing these comments and posts doesn't mean other people aren't.
Then join an instance that blocks the instances you don't like? The main benefit of Lemmy is that there's many different instances with different moderation approaches.
You forgot that lemmy.ml, lemmygrad, & hexbear exist.
Hexbear is... I'm just old I guess, I don't understand. My instance is not defederated from them. Whenever I'm reading a post that originates from hexbear, I can always tell. Like it will just hit me and I will look at the source and yep, it's hexbear.
But I don't exactly understand why. I can't see that they have any particular worldview, they just have a unique (and contrarian) way of expressing... all worldviews, seemingly. It feels like an inside joke that I don't have enough information about to understand.
Doesn't seem like bots, Russian or otherwise. Too vague. Not enough of a directed agenda. Is it just trolls? They seem to earnest to be trolls.
They're basically trans communist genocide deniers, they've run troll ops which is why they've been mass de-federated.
See https://lemmy.world/post/2498330
This article makes me think this is a tankie wiki, because literally everyone from that awful place is a tankie as far as I can tell.
It is a tankie wiki, but what a better way to expose their tankie nature than the tankies themself.
They've chosen a very confrontational path with the way their instance interacts with others, and as a result they get a lot of push back, which just makes them angrier. I suspect anyone trying to be reasonable on the instance gets accused of not being a true believer as well, so only the angriest remain.
Also, Boost for Lemmy allows you to block an entire instance, it's pretty handy.
They're kids that like confrontation. They don't actually have any agenda other than "this hexbear user said to follow this!" And they jump on it. The next day could be a completely different stance on the subject.
Their community came over here long before all us old Redditors and it seems like they've cultivated their own culture and in-jokes and such. It can get confusing to pierce all the irony and sarcasm to figure out what they're saying sometimes.
As a Russian bot, I'm deeply offended
same here, i really hate all this neo-liberal drivel about how everything they don't like is a CCP/Kremlin sponsored propoganda
SMCF is one of the comfort usernames that I've seen around ever since joining Lemmy
Same tbh, the name always gives me a smirk lol
Yes yes it does… shart … fucker… 420, oh! shark! Misread it.
I read this comment several times and I still don't understand it. Stand out for what? What content and patterns?
You can put your own nickname next to the names of other users, to catalog them/ mark trolls or whatever. That seems to be what Don is doing inbetween Rampages
I wasn't even aware this was a thing
Tags are much more noticeable than user names. It tends to stick out more from the rest of the post and makes you notice who the poster is. After seeing them enough you tend to get a feel for the type of content they post about.
Yeah, there's a lot of power posters here. PugJesus is an example from the opposite camp, calling out the anti-Democrat propaganda from the two OP mentioned.
I mean it's hard not to be when we're essentially 8 people in a trenchcoat pretending to be social media lol
It has actually made me feel really awkward knowing just how small this place is. I have this tension between not being able to shut the fuck up and also not wanting to be "known" (maybe in the biblical sense though lol)
I have this tension between not being able to shut the fuck up and also not wanting to be “known”
Typical Asafum
Ofmg it's lemmy microcelebrity Asafum!
I kind of like the size to be honest, feels more like I'm having an impact by commenting instead of just getting added to the bottom of a 2000 comment post. I never really commented on the other site for that reason.
Very different dropping a coin in a lake than a coin in a bucket.
wow I'm offended but you are right
You mean every opinion I don't like isn't automatically a tankie Russian bot???
No, he means every opinion you don't like is automatically a tankie bot. That's what lemmy is. From tankies, for tankies.
yes every opinion you don't like isnt automaticly a russian bot and everyone's entitled to have an opinion
Luckily it's not a monolith and it's perfectly easy not to interact with lemmygrad. Is world even federated with them?
Not at all but that's not the problem. Although grad and communities like them such as r/movingtonorthkoera and r/greenandunpleasent are what is the problem is both .ml and .world are pretty much massive echo chambers. Half the time I'm not quite sure if I'm on Devs instance or world.
We need rogersimon. I miss his long stories that always ended with his dad beating him with a set of jumper cables.
Downpunxx has been banned from enough places for you guys to forget about him, but kbin refugees will never forget.
Former kbiner, but out of the loop on this one. What's I miss?
He's just a notorious genocide cheering guy. He got site banned from Lemmy.world but since kbin allowed you to keep replying locally and he would boost himself to be on the top of the conversation he'd be a general annoyance for us.
Yeah idk. There is getting to be a lot of gonewild content too.
Thank Christ. Lemmy has been too prudish for too long.
You just have to block the lemmy.nfsw instance and it goes away. I'm not into porn and doing that made Lemmy lovely.
I'll start posting more content in a few days. I've been traveling and working a lot. But I've also been playing project zomboid on single player so we'll see if I follow through with my promise.
Make memes based off the game please
The rarity of trolls is nice. The near absence of advertising accounts is immeasurably gratifying. Valuing both privacy and Linux is…
Lemmy is an improvement on Reddit, but imo not by much. There really is no innovation on the fundamental concept of subreddits/communities. The issue with Lemmy is that I've come across so many promising communities that quickly die off after the initial spurt of activity. I wonder if there is a better organic way to grow the "online discussion" from some form of general cespool, that can segementize only later when those needed segments (communities) emerge naturally.
It's an egregious error to not have The Picard Manuever as our Supreme Ruler
Another social media claims it's the better than everything else while it's clearly not for the nth time. Why am I not surprised
Yay not relevant enough to spam/ AstroTurf!
i seeked lemmy world out, so glad to be here.
what finally made me NEED to get away from R****t was the manufactured outrage, clickbait to an incredible degree. people purposely putting up content that reinforces the status quo by encouraging people to get mad about situations that challenge the status quo.
also ridiculously stupid questions, way too many people posting photos of shit and asking "whats wrong here" like come on what the fuck. i'm so sick of it.
I really should figure out how to get to Lemmy at work. Reddit is wide open but my firewall blocks Lemmy in some random "catch all" filtering.
Me as an instance admin sitting here reading about how Lemmy doesn't have trolls and Russian bots, while I'm in a chat with other instance admins and mods where we need to actively coordinate to fight the trolls and Russian bots 😐
Thank you for your service! (sounds sarcastic, is not)
Yeah... OP is blind to the massive Kremlin and CCP propaganda problem here in the Fediverse.
After hexbear got defederated from most of the major instances, the fucking losers just make alts on different instances so they can continue defending that propaganda filled shithole. Now .ml seems like the new worst, no matter what you do these no-life losers will find a way to spread their bullshit.
Takes much more effort to try and stop them than it does for these losers to make alts unfortunately.
I was under the impression that the .ml admins actually promote them because it's run by people from Hexbear.
It's a bit more mask on, and there's a few legit communities there, as opposed to Hexbear where the entire instance has a stated goal.
But it's pretty bad.
Ml is run by the creators of Lemmy, and hexbear is well... Not. Hexbear made their own fork of lemmy a long time ago and only in the past year or so have they been actually able to federate at all. I don't see the creators of Lemmy going through all that effort to hide their identities if they were actually running hexbear behind the scenes
Confusing the bear with 'grad
Hexbear wasn't federated to begin with for many instances, and Lemmy.ml hasn't really changed as a result of Hexbear getting defederated by servers like Lemmy.world and Lemmy.ca, because Hexbear has a more secluded user-base. Hexbear intentionally tries to be careful with who they federate with.
They're not just some losers sitting on their mom's basements, they're paid or programmed to spread disinformation and division.
By a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.
Welcome to IT. If everything is on fire, they ask why you’re even here, and if everything is ready for the fire and there’s nothing left to do, they also ask why you’re even here
I'm yet to see any in the last year personally, so I guess it's working?
That's honestly pretty amazing that you've been here a year and haven't seen a troll! Though you're on an instance with a very active and determined admin, there is definitely a difference in how much you see between instances because of how removals work.
picking the right instance seems to be half the battle for users
You guys are pretty proactive about blocking and defederating bad faith instances, or even ones not doing enough to deal with bad actors. You were one of the first to defederate Hexbear, and I think you even defederated world at one point?
Hexbear defederated blahaj.zone, actually. Here is the original thread going over why.
Thank you for your service
Oh, hey Dave. Small world huh?
👋
I haven't seen much of it at all in my 1+ year here, so y'all are doing a great job :3
The matrix admin group or a different one?
The matrix one
Wtf. Why didn't you mention the cringe lord emperor striker?!
Edit: using my mod powers to get attention.
Leaching on to mod powers to grab attention, for what purpose, I do not know.
To prevent the all powerful cum tsunami from wiping us all out
Nah, that one seems too funny to miss
Put me in the screenshot
Not me though thanks
The elon musk mindset. Lmao
Thank you god-modereor for showing us the way... By force!
Goderator?
Don't give them any ideas!
Can any mere man wield such ferocious, blinding power?
A terrifyingly, beautiful thing to behold. But only just a glance.
I'm scared, feel like... like an Upper Neolithic man witnessing Nikolai Tesla inside his Faraday cage, as the bright blue electric current crackles and arches all around him.
I mean if you have to ask, the answer is obvious.
@admin MOD ABUSE!!!!!
Well except for the entire population of Hexbear and the 'Grad...
I'm fairly sure they aren't bots, but definitely pro Russia.
bots, sockpuppets, infowarfare it's all different vlads in the same bag
Last I checked hexbear had something like 70% more total comments than lemmy.world despite only having a tiny fraction of the users. Sounds like bots to me
Hexbear has had an established and more active community for a longer time than Lemmy.world. You can visit Hexbear yourself and check, it's not illegal or anything.
Over time Lemmy.world may overtake Hexbear, but not for a while.
I have imagined that ever since the Reddit emigration hype ended and things settled down a bit here that the vast majority of world and shit users are mostly lurkers and not terribly vocal, as is the case on a lot of other platforms.
Well Hexbear also had a policy of not showing down votes to encourage users to respond if they disagree instead of just down voting and moving on.
That's very ironic given that they ban anyone further left than "Capitalist Russia is the best country in the world! Let's support their invasion of Ukraine for no reason! Ughur genocide fake by the way! Is not so bad that Stalin banned being gay."
It's not that they don't show downvotes only, you literally cannot downvote on Hexbear.
Plus whenever somebody talks ill about the CCP over there they get barraged by copypasta responses. Their posts mirror popular posts on other servers, and generally lack any form of real discussion. The place looks like the bottiest of all instances and nothing can change my mind.
Skill issue.
A lot of troll accounts are semi-automated. They run a script that detects certain keywords, and posts premade replies to them (nowadays said premade replies are being finetuned with generative AI to look less uniform), also a human is watching over them to ensure both correct operation and to overtake in case of emergency.
Source: My father's ex-girlfriend's ex-boyfriend was (is) a paid online troll for Fidesz. They also had Discord (later Matrix if I recall) servers for organizing mass reports, downvotes, angry/haha react campaigns, often they also did some "private doxxing".
Seems like a rock solid source making claims that are definitely falsifiable.
Well, it's a first-hand account
So's this
you sent me an excerpt from a simpsons episode...
Vs you from lemmy.ml who's just here to spread lies.
And large parts of .ml, which is the bridge for hexbear to all the instances which defederated with them.
It really does feel like hexbear users are probably high fiving each other over their cubicle walls in Vladivostok. The admin openly states their goal is information warfare.
I'm convinced those people have to be elaborate trolls. Like the flat earthers.
nah - they are very real. Maybe sock puppets but real. I imagine them like rich 15 year old kids beeing “rad and cool”
Idk ozma was pushing a super hard the left should protest vote or not vote before getting called out in every thread. They have been slowly evolving the shill to be less and less obvious. Even started posting memes and other content to try and get the political agenda across without posting negative articles. Now the message isnt the very obvous up front don't vote, but they are just "critical of Biden," yet have nothing to say about anyone else. Doesn't seem like an edgy kid to me.
Linkerbaan is similar but hasn't evolved yet. Still an obvious shill.
It's super neat being in a different federation group than other posters, I have no idea what the bad places are like
Just need to swap SatansMaggotyCumFart with Jimmydoreisalefty.
@SatansMaggotyCumFart@lemmy.world is simply irreverent; not a troll.
I need to figure out what irreverent means so I know if I should be insulted.
Trust me - it’s better than some fucking herb…
Damn I forgot about dore is a lefty!
He definitely is not. He's a grifter that parrots a lot of right wing nut job conspiracy theories like anti-vaxxing. He's a Liberal at most.
There is a user named JimmyDoreIsALefty who constantly posts bait and argues in the comments of it.
Sinister as shit.
Ok, so I'm not the only one who noticed that their spam has a weird taste to it. It's got that vibe of some agreeable left-wing content but then feels likes it only there to mask authoritarian narrative building.
I'm glad I'm not the only one. That account is truly bizarre (from the point of view of how they write and express themselves). I've engaged with them a few times and it's like a weird loop. I know it's a real person, but it feels like talking to a script or dialog tree because it always goes down the same 1-2 dialog paths
I think it’s a bot assisted human. The amount of spam they output is inhuman but they do interact like a human at times.
Even without any karma system, interacting with the users here is a breath of fresh air. Lemmy has the least shills and bots compared to the poison in most other platforms. It's currently Lemmy's best asset and where it stands out from all existing social media imo, and I hope it remains this way.
They’re certainly easier to avoid.
Because it's not popular yet. Wait until it becomes so and the inevitable enshittification happens.
Enshittification isn't what happens when something becomes popular, it's what happens to disruptive tech and commodities that get increasingly fine-tuned for profit after competition inevitably floods in. It's a product of monetization.
Lemmy is FOSS so that won't happen, plus you can splinter off into your own walled garden instance like Beehaw if you want.
You make it sound like monetization can't happen on a FOSS platform. Bots are a form of monetization, it's just not by the people who created and control the platform.
As it gets popular, bots will come for the purpose of creating an audience and monetizing them.
That's true, but it's just not enshittification because it's not done by the platform itself. It's a different word.
Hmmm interesting. I was under the impression that enshitification was "making something shittier in the pursuit of (eg) greed", I didn't realize that it only applies to when the creator (controller? owner?) of the thing does it.
Has it always been used for this specific case? If so, what is the word for the more general case I described?
The original use is specifically a service platform that's made worse by the owners to get more money after first being good to everyone to collect a large user base, then by squeezing the general end users, then by squeezing the business customers to collect value for themselves.
It sounds like a really specific definition, but you'd be surprised by how often it applies. He originally thought of it to apply to Tik Tok after noticing it following a similar pattern as Facebook, Amazon, and I think Google. Then the internet realized it could keep applying his term to so many more companies, like Spotify, Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, Reddit, Microsoft, Apple, all streaming companies, and even physical product companies like car companies or John Deere, etc and it's shot up in popularity and use since then.
Not sure of the general use case you describe, but the person who invented the term in that article I linked sounds like he doesn't mind if it's used in a more general case for things getting worse from greed, so feel free to go ahead and keep using it I guess lol. Although maybe we should come up with a different, more general term for that if there isn't already one? I've got nothing, but if anyone has suggestions lol.
Ey used the wrong word, but this in fact is correct. Once lemmy gets popular, bot farms will definitely will siege it, and the amount of "bots and shills" will rise
Maybe "dickheadification" instead?
Have we forgotten that we also have Margot Robbie?
I think that she prefers "Academy Award-nominated character actor, and producer Margot Robbie".
Star of the Barbie movie, now available on Blu Ray at your local retailers!
Are you saying that she's a bot or a troll?
I'm saying she's an academy award nominated character actor and producer
On the internet, no one knows if you're A̶u̶s̶t̶r̶a̶l̶i̶a̶n̶ Academy Award winning actress Margot Robbie.
I’d estimate blocking ozma has reduced the amount of “Trump and the GOP may be attempting to install a fascist dictatorship but Biden’s old” nonsense in my feed by 95%.
I've blocked both of them, as well as the politicalmemes community and my Lemmy experience has gotten so much better.
Ozma got banned from politicalmemes recently and it's 1000% better for it
The tragic thing, though, is that if lemmy ever "takes off", there's nothing about it that will make it any more resistant to bots and trolls.
It's kinda like back when Macs had no viruses, because nobody bothered.
I disagree. Lemmy is more resistant to bots because there’s no perverse incentive to boost user activity numbers to please investors and advertisers. Reddit for example doesn’t really care if most comments are fake on a post. It’s still interaction and it pumps numbers. Lemmy is built and run by us. It serves no other masters.
Given that users naturally self-sort into instances, your trolls are also more likely to congregate on instances and communities that can be blocked. I don’t want to name any names but I do block some instances from my view for a reason. The Russian bots congregate in places that are amenable to this, and the design of Lemmy encourages this self-sorting into places where you’re accepted.
The problem is still significant, but there are advantages to the fediverse.
I think it would be more likely bots would flood instances with posts at a level that was unrealistic for the small scale admins we currently have to combat.
There is a bit of a chain of trust, however. Instance fills with spam bots? Defed.
Spam bots start making their own instances? Go to whitelists.
And as henfredemars says, because there is no financial incentive to grow the userbase, instances can slow things right down if the spam starts.
nah, descentralisation is what help, i already read as article explaining exactly that, lemmy problem is that one of it first instances are full of trolls lol
Not only that, but it's actually a much easier target because of the relatively sporadic moderation.
Compared to reddit, the Fediverse's ability to moderate propaganda and advertising is puny and uncoordinated.
Hard disagree. I'm already spending less time here because the Kremlin and CCP propaganda ruins the experience for me. I don't even consider recommending it to people I know for the same reason.
You can block Instances that like those, or switch to and instance where the admins do it on an instance level.
Eh just block the tankie instances. That problem goes away quickly!
Just because I'm not seeing these comments and posts doesn't mean other people aren't. And if they're seeing it, then they'll get seduced by the evil tankie mind-control rays. That means I've got to start blocking them, too.
Pretty soon, I'll be in this shrinking walled garden of fewer and fewer people who say things I approve of. And then what?! I might begin to question my own self-righteousness or engage in some degree of critical reflection of views. That'll be it. They'll have gotten to me, too!
The whole Lemmy.world community needs to be severed from any instance of heresy. Otherwise, my personal views might be put at risk.
Uphold Lemmy.world Thought
Then join an instance that blocks the instances you don't like? The main benefit of Lemmy is that there's many different instances with different moderation approaches.
You forgot that lemmy.ml, lemmygrad, & hexbear exist.
Hexbear is... I'm just old I guess, I don't understand. My instance is not defederated from them. Whenever I'm reading a post that originates from hexbear, I can always tell. Like it will just hit me and I will look at the source and yep, it's hexbear.
But I don't exactly understand why. I can't see that they have any particular worldview, they just have a unique (and contrarian) way of expressing... all worldviews, seemingly. It feels like an inside joke that I don't have enough information about to understand.
Doesn't seem like bots, Russian or otherwise. Too vague. Not enough of a directed agenda. Is it just trolls? They seem to earnest to be trolls.
https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Hexbear
They're basically trans communist genocide deniers, they've run troll ops which is why they've been mass de-federated.
See https://lemmy.world/post/2498330
This article makes me think this is a tankie wiki, because literally everyone from that awful place is a tankie as far as I can tell.
It is a tankie wiki, but what a better way to expose their tankie nature than the tankies themself.
They've chosen a very confrontational path with the way their instance interacts with others, and as a result they get a lot of push back, which just makes them angrier. I suspect anyone trying to be reasonable on the instance gets accused of not being a true believer as well, so only the angriest remain.
Also, Boost for Lemmy allows you to block an entire instance, it's pretty handy.
They're kids that like confrontation. They don't actually have any agenda other than "this hexbear user said to follow this!" And they jump on it. The next day could be a completely different stance on the subject.
Their community came over here long before all us old Redditors and it seems like they've cultivated their own culture and in-jokes and such. It can get confusing to pierce all the irony and sarcasm to figure out what they're saying sometimes.
As a Russian bot, I'm deeply offended
same here, i really hate all this neo-liberal drivel about how everything they don't like is a CCP/Kremlin sponsored propoganda
SMCF is one of the comfort usernames that I've seen around ever since joining Lemmy
Same tbh, the name always gives me a smirk lol
Yes yes it does… shart … fucker… 420, oh! shark! Misread it.
Very good +1000 social credit, OP
I see a lot by "the Picard maneuver" or something like that. I can't remember if I like their posts, but there's a lot.
Tpm is basically porting all old memes from the previous site over. He probably posts 30 a day or smt
Ah. I didn't know. I also don't know how one does that. But makes sense I guess seeing all those posts.
wait, you guys read usernames?
I tag a lot of people with nicknames. Really makes them stand out a lot more, and when they do the type of content and patterns stick out a lot more.
What app are you using that lets you tag? I love Eternity but if I can get a similar experience with user tagging I'd be pretty excited to try it
Connect and Voyager both let me
I tag propaganda accounts all the time using Boost and Connect. Connect is FOSS, Boost was a Reddit app. You really do notice patterns.
or just block them?
I think the Fediverse will fail of regular people don't push back against the propaganda. There's no budget for countering misinformation.
I read this comment several times and I still don't understand it. Stand out for what? What content and patterns?
You can put your own nickname next to the names of other users, to catalog them/ mark trolls or whatever. That seems to be what Don is doing inbetween Rampages
I wasn't even aware this was a thing
Tags are much more noticeable than user names. It tends to stick out more from the rest of the post and makes you notice who the poster is. After seeing them enough you tend to get a feel for the type of content they post about.
Ooh! What's mine?
cutest boy
Wow, thanks!
Yeah, there's a lot of power posters here. PugJesus is an example from the opposite camp, calling out the anti-Democrat propaganda from the two OP mentioned.
Thank you @satansmaggotycumfart@lemmy.world for making this site a better place o7
You give me bender vibes
I'm sure he greatly appreciated that, Sharkfucker420
@SatansMaggotyCumFart@lemmy.world is a fucking sage, fight me.
No, he's a copulating thyme! fights
If it doesn't hurt anyone else why do you care? Swings haymaker
I actually don't, I just wanted to join in turns on bread maker
Wait we're making bread? I thought you wanted a fight?
Bread makes for excellent sustenance and nonlethal thrown weapons 😉
nonlethal?! 🥱
We can't all be Americans who bring a shotgun to a fistfight 😛😁
That's just our cops... 😒
Lemmy is an echo chamber.
I mean it's hard not to be when we're essentially 8 people in a trenchcoat pretending to be social media lol
It has actually made me feel really awkward knowing just how small this place is. I have this tension between not being able to shut the fuck up and also not wanting to be "known" (maybe in the biblical sense though lol)
Typical Asafum
Ofmg it's lemmy microcelebrity Asafum!
I kind of like the size to be honest, feels more like I'm having an impact by commenting instead of just getting added to the bottom of a 2000 comment post. I never really commented on the other site for that reason.
Very different dropping a coin in a lake than a coin in a bucket.
wow I'm offended but you are right
You mean every opinion I don't like isn't automatically a tankie Russian bot???
No, he means every opinion you don't like is automatically a tankie bot. That's what lemmy is. From tankies, for tankies.
yes every opinion you don't like isnt automaticly a russian bot and everyone's entitled to have an opinion
Luckily it's not a monolith and it's perfectly easy not to interact with lemmygrad. Is world even federated with them?
Not at all but that's not the problem. Although grad and communities like them such as r/movingtonorthkoera and r/greenandunpleasent are what is the problem is both .ml and .world are pretty much massive echo chambers. Half the time I'm not quite sure if I'm on Devs instance or world.
We need rogersimon. I miss his long stories that always ended with his dad beating him with a set of jumper cables.
Downpunxx has been banned from enough places for you guys to forget about him, but kbin refugees will never forget.
Former kbiner, but out of the loop on this one. What's I miss?
He's just a notorious genocide cheering guy. He got site banned from Lemmy.world but since kbin allowed you to keep replying locally and he would boost himself to be on the top of the conversation he'd be a general annoyance for us.
Yeah idk. There is getting to be a lot of gonewild content too.
Thank Christ. Lemmy has been too prudish for too long.
You just have to block the lemmy.nfsw instance and it goes away. I'm not into porn and doing that made Lemmy lovely.
I'll start posting more content in a few days. I've been traveling and working a lot. But I've also been playing project zomboid on single player so we'll see if I follow through with my promise.
Make memes based off the game please
The rarity of trolls is nice. The near absence of advertising accounts is immeasurably gratifying. Valuing both privacy and Linux is…
Lemmy is an improvement on Reddit, but imo not by much. There really is no innovation on the fundamental concept of subreddits/communities. The issue with Lemmy is that I've come across so many promising communities that quickly die off after the initial spurt of activity. I wonder if there is a better organic way to grow the "online discussion" from some form of general cespool, that can segementize only later when those needed segments (communities) emerge naturally.
One thing that I love about Lemmy is how there are people that I always recognise. And you are one of them!
Which one is the bot and which is the troll?
It's an egregious error to not have The Picard Manuever as our Supreme Ruler
Another social media claims it's the better than everything else while it's clearly not for the nth time. Why am I not surprised
Yay not relevant enough to spam/ AstroTurf!
i seeked lemmy world out, so glad to be here. what finally made me NEED to get away from R****t was the manufactured outrage, clickbait to an incredible degree. people purposely putting up content that reinforces the status quo by encouraging people to get mad about situations that challenge the status quo.
also ridiculously stupid questions, way too many people posting photos of shit and asking "whats wrong here" like come on what the fuck. i'm so sick of it.
I really should figure out how to get to Lemmy at work. Reddit is wide open but my firewall blocks Lemmy in some random "catch all" filtering.
@Amoxtli coming up fast in the rankings.....
May I enter the chat?
No.
Sorry, the cheese has spoken.
https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/bc118a87-a2e0-49e6-a670-9fd45dd7061d
There's a lot of other shit but it seems that it's organically sorting itself out over time.
The latter username reminds me of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jo4XXm8OUP4
Всмысле блядь нет русских ботов? Я что для вас, шутка?
бип-буп, на месте
They got called out.