It's still okay for niche communities, and that's probably why people still go there
This for sure. It's something severely lacking at Lemmy, without the large user base the small communities can't sustain the way they do on Reddit. Lemmy serves best as a replacement for the biggest subs.
I noticed I'm not even missing the small subs anymore.
4 different meme subs about an obscure Romanian soap opera don't improve my quality of life.
Memes no, but I've found a lot of value in things like my hometown has a pretty active sub on Reddit which is useful for local information or subs around specific TV shows or video games bring a lot of interesting discussion or just asking questions on niche topics I'm much more likely to get an answer from a larger user base.
My home town subreddit has seen at least 1 news years eve orgy organised through it, havent seen anything comparable on lemmy!
Hobby subs are the big one. If your hobby is anything other than dicking around with Linux, we probably don't have much of a community for it, if we have one at all.
Truth. RVs and sailboats are not here. But I feel confident I’d get all the discussion I need if I wanted to install Linux on my sailboat.
Have you considered a Framework sailboat? They're a little more expensive, but they're designed with repairability in mind, and come with Linux pre-installed
Framework sailboats are overpriced garbage!!
You would be better off with a thinkboat x61s
In all honesty the lack of super specific and active communities on lemmy has actually improved my quality of life. I spend much, much less time scrolling and reading shit.
It's a valid point, but it's kind of like saying it's great that the restaurant you've started going to has such a small menu compared to the old one because you're not eating as much.
I'm a picky eater so yeah that works for me
The user volume to support niche communities is the most obvious thing missing in Lemmy. But I have a darker view of the future. Picture LLM bots forging organic-looking conversations that result in a product recommendation. It looks like a genuine human conversation, but it’s actually an advertisement. Maybe it’s mixed with some human comments, but that may only add to the realism of the fraud.
That kind of ”advertising“ could potentially command a lot of money. And it could probably eventually infect just about any text platform. Maybe Lemmy as well someday?
You could deploy it pretty effectively in sufficiently large niche communities.
Picture LLM bots forging organic-looking conversations that result in a product recommendation.
Yep I can confirm, I lived in my tiny reddit bubble a lot of time to care about trending shit and bots stuff.
Exactly. In specific communities it's by far the best discussion platform. And I don't go to a site first discussion second, other way around, so to reddit I go for those.
People go there because they don't care about interacting with other human beings. They just want an echo chamber and to occasionally feel like they are an Influencer.
And you can see the same at lemmy. Someone posts something someone doesn't like? Immediate downvote (and, for the more pathetic people, downvoting on a few alts as well) with no comment or even attempt to refute things other than MAYBE an ad hominem. And plenty of "What is your favorite X" spam-engagement posts that just involve repeating whatever marketing schpiel they heard in the past.
There has been a recent tendency for people to reference social media network sites that are nothing but bots and... it is increasingly obvious that that is what most people want. They want to feel like they are the tastemakers. They want to be moistcritical without needing to focus test the most normy of center-right takes.
It's supposed to be for bad faith posts/comments not just for disagreement
I downvote comments that promote hateful ideologies, whether or no they were posted in bad faith. I also downvote posts that derail the conversation, whether or not I think they were posted in bad faith because it is impossible to know if someone is posting in good faith from an individual post. By the time a pattern is clear the thread is derailed.
Context also matters, because the same post about grilled mushrooms as a substitute for grilled steaks will be posted in good faith to different posts and be a net positive or negative depending on the post. A post about grilling in general? Positive, because it adds to the topic! A post about the best cut of beef for grilling? Negative, because it derails the thread to be about not eating beef.
Sure, people should not be downvoting non-important topics or views that they could just block instead. But a lot of people also assume bad faith when someone disagrees with them, so that isn't good criteria either.
Those are also good reasons, i.e. more than just "I disagree"
It's supposed to be for whatever the fuck you want to use it for. There's no downvote police on lemmy.
Personally, I upvote every reply I get and nothing else.
Ultimately, it's supposed to be used to make post/comments less visible, for whatever reason.
And it doesn't really have much of an effect on lemmy at all.
Sick burn and true, we have so few comments that we read all of them anyway.
Sometimes it seems like Lemmy users sort by most negative first just so they can keep dogpiling on the comments with negative vote score.
Which is a Reddit behaviour, and probably came from whatever existed before Reddit too.
Yeah, I mean, sort by controversial is there for a reason.
Yes, it's good to realise that lemmy is just as much an echo chamber as reddit is. Same echoes, differnet voice. But don't you dare actually having a different voice, that will not be appreciate. People want to have discussions, but only with yes men.
stop saying the truth. it hurts their feelings.
Using this low of a contrast (dark red on dark background) is criminal. Maybe my eyes are just that bad but good lord those notes are hard to read
This just proves that OP is not a bot, he is a dumb human like us
It's not even mine, I put the source in the post.
But I agree with the poor colour choice
After this comment I am exactly 27.3% more suspicious of OP being a bot after all.
Not necessarily. Bots can read text equally well on any colour. This might prove he is a bot.
In any case, a crime has been committed. Call the cops.
Yeah it's awful. My vision is pretty good but this literally hurts to look at
Gather round, children, and let me tell you a story of the same type of mindless corporate stupidity that happened in my state, about how something successful was ruined because all they could see was at the surface level...
When the mini-market chain AM/PM opened some stores in Baja California, they came up with a hybrid concept that also included a made-to-order fast food kitchen serving burgers, and a sizable seating area, they called this Dave's Kitchen. It was a huge, huge hit.
Enter 7-11 into the scene. Getting wind of this new phenomenon and armed with corporate cash from their Mexico offices in... Monterrey I think it was... they bought every AM/PM in the state and converted them to 7-11s, surely salivating at the prospect of this large client base that was supposedly built-in with their acquisition.
So what was the first thing they did?
They shuttered Dave's Kitchen. Poof... gone!
They got rid of the soda machine, the ice cream machine... instead of assimilating the business model of what they had bought, they got rid of everything that made these AM/PMs unique in the market, replaced it with their own bland and generic way of doing things according to the home office in Monterrey.
Within a month, the new 7-11s had lost around 3/4 of their customers. Their emergency response was to send in a squad of corporate poll takers to pester the customers still there and see... why the other ones had gone, I guess?
Asking the wrong questions (why did the customers leave in droves?) to the wrong people (the few remaining clients who didn't leave). And thus, nothing of value was learned, because when your corporate business school suits are clumsy unthinking hammers, every situation and problem look like a goddamned nail.
Gather round children; as I tell you the story of Georgie Pie, it offered cheap local (to NZ) fast food, in this case meat and sweet pies.
Highly successful and well loved, it was a common sight across the country. Unfortunately, the corporate entities from off shore came in, diluting the fast food dollar across many more options. MacDonald's brought the struggling Georgie Pie; mainly for its locations and to remove a competitor from the market.
Every few years; to maintain the trade mark, MacDonald's runs a Georgie Pie promotion where you can get a pie from MacDonald's. It is like the zombie of local "cuisine" reanimated over and over again to server its master; for the only job it is good for.
Now this truly does sound like a horrifying story.
Move over McRib, 'cause here comes Georgie "Please Let Me Die" Pie, even less often than you do!
Imagine if McDonald's had actually defeated Jollibee in the Philippines, absorbed them, then resuscitated their menu once a year.
But that didn't happen, I wonder how did Jollibee not only survive, but thrive? What was their crucial chessboard move there?
Perhaps they realized it would be cheaper to stop the growth of a superior product. Especially when that superior product would likely require more types of costs that would eat corporate level profit. More higher paid employees that can't be mechanized.
Status quo is incredibly profitable, assuming nothing threatens it. That's why big business does everything they can to increase the barrier of entry, and happily overpays to buy out successful competitors, with the leadership of the competitors having enforceable noncompetes for the model.
The fact that they polled customers afterwards points to this being a simple corporate fuckup. This kind of thing regularly happens as well where I live despite noncompetes basically not being enforceable.
Acquiring companies is easy, but it extremely rarely goes well. The incentives and skills required to buy something and give a sales pitch to a private equity firm simply do not overlap with the incentives and skills required to vertically integrate that thing without completely destroying it.
In many ways these corporate ghouls are like serial hobbyists. Buying all kinds of expensive toys and tools they don't understand then breaking them and/or giving up.
Obviously absolute speculation on my part, but if they were truly doing what I suggested intentionally, part of the plan would need to be plausible deniability to avoid anti-monopoly issues, and also public sentiment nightmare. Killing your favorite shop out of incompetence doesn't win good will, but you will still go there. Doing it out of malicious intent could have people in other states joining a boycott.
I'm in management, participated in the acquisition process of the company I'm at being acquired. At least at the 150mm/year revenue level there's no one doing the shit I'm suggesting, no one is so competent. Cash on hand is bad , acquisition is an obvious way to deal with that. You're spot on about skills though, 95% of management at every level is totally incompetent at the work required to actually do management shit. All the competent people leave as soon as they can because the work just got way harder and the money doesn't follow.
that they polled customers afterwards points to this being a simple corporate fuckup
Yes, this is my thought as well. They bought their way into the market, somehow thinking it was the chunk of real estate and not the services provided that kept customers coming back over and over again. They didn't even bother to see what these services were, came in like a bull in a china shop, indifferent to the point of oblivious about it, even as the accounting department back at the home office had to process out all the kitchen equipment, the self-service soda and ice cream machines, etc., from every store in Baja.
Nowadays, 7-11 is still there, puttering along, as a generic clone of Oxxo, the other large mini-market chain in Mexico, offering nothing special, except maybe along the lines of - "Hmm... Oxxo is three blocks this way, 7-11 is one block that way, I guess I'll go to 7-11", and Oxxos are everywhere, Jesus... like somebody gleefully abused the copy/paste function.
AM/PM honestly sounds like what the Sheetz chain does these days in a lot of ways.
News flash: it’s not just ask Reddit. It’s Reddit entirely. That place is a shithole of bots.
The only good answers I find to things are 3+ years old.
Yeah. That or niche subreddits that just aren’t popular enough to warrant bots. Like specific game communities. But even some of the big ones are full of bots.
Beep, boop! I am a bot, and this action was performed naturally.
Am I really a bot though?
Ok this red on black contrast is awful on the eyes.
I look forward to meeting my undeleted zombie Reddit account one day. I'm picturing it like Shaun and Ed at the end of Shaun of the Dead.
I'm almost tempted to turn off 2fa on my account and give it a weak password just to see what its next life becomes.
It's remarkable, the questions that aren't from bots are completely indistinguishable.
It's all low quality engagement bait, and all these questions were on the front page of askreddit a hundred times with slight variations.
They're indistinguishable because they're copied from top-voted posts that are a few years old (title, text, and image if applicable). It's guaranteed to produce a post that fits the community and gets a lot of engagement, so it's a cheap and effective way to mature a bot account. Once you start looking for it, it's everywhere, and Reddit admins don't care.
Have you ever noticed those low effort reposts also getting the same top 10 comments as the original? It's slop all the way down.
What’s the aim? What do they use the accounts for once they’ve acquired the karma, which I am assume is the goal.
I'm speculating, but my guesses are:
Gathering enough karma to post on subreddits that have a minimum threshold.
Getting enough post and comment history to pass a casual inspection, either by human moderators or spam filters.
Maturing the account to the point where it can be sold to another shady company.
Generally having a lot of bot accounts ready, just in case.
Once mature, it's usually used for spam or astroturfing. There is a noticeable uptick around big elections, wars, etc.
I saw one repost-bot that metastisized into the most vile porn-spam-bot you can imagine, but they're usually more subtle than that.
Advertising or scams usually. A high amount of posts, comments, and karma makes an account look trustworthy.
Thanks
how are people so bad with colors
Pissing off all their best users sure was a fantastic idea.
I've never understood what anyone gets out of hosting and spamming reddit with bots
Selling accounts with high karma to people wanting to push an agenda with a seemingly legit account
Conspiracy hat on:
It's done by Reddit themselves. They know user visits are dropping. They know power users have slipped. To avoid making it look like a desert, they have bots create content.
Reddit's origin story is sockpuppeting as users.
They'll do it again
The difference between now and then though, is they were a private company.
Unless they disclose they use bots to post content and make the site look active, any use of user count and engagement for any aspect of the company becomes fraud as its misleading investors.
Oh we have 1 million posts an hour! Fraud.
Oh we have 100 million monthly active users! Fraud!
Investors Q/A - do you use bots? Answer No. Fraud.
Fraud doesn't really stop a big company, if they can get away with it.
Facebook for example.
And whose to say it's not them directly, but a "third party who Reddit pays for user acquisition" services?
They can pay a random LLC to do it for them.
Q&A do you use bots to generate content or have you used any 3rd party that uses bots themselves directly or through another party.
As long as its asked and it gets leaked they lied it's fraud.
Plausible deniability doesn't work if proof comes out.
You don't hire a hitman and get off scott free when proof comes out you hired a hitman.
Conspiracy: Reddit sells bots and bot acquired analytics to high paying corpos, but are losing sales to secondary markets undercutting the reddit sold bots.
The 9Gag way...
My friend still uses reddit
Mature accounts with some activity are worth money to people looking to AstroTurf political discussions.
Not just political, it helps brands advertise as well
How much can I make with a 10 yo account with average karma? Where can i sell it?
Huh, even the most "aged" and high-karma accounts seem to top out under $1k, average for a well-used account seems $300-500, and most for way less. Wonder how many sales are actually made.
I haven't thought about Reddit since the mod ban but aren't people being paid to make content? So could be mass farming nickels?
If reddit hadn't locked their API behind absurd paywalls, it would have been a cool project to try to make a browser plugin that gives accounts a "credit score" based on the factors you've been looking at, in order to let users quickly judge how likely an account is a bot.
It could let people adjust the metrics it uses to calculate that score in the settings, so even if it becomes popular enough for bots to start trying to game the system, people can adapt their scoring metrics themselves and share config profiles that they think are more effective at rating bots.
Might be something cool to see for activitypub/fediverse/lemmy accounts, but with the data available varying by instance it might be a little harder to calibrate a "catch-all" scoring config
A lot of the site feels like it’s been overrun by bots. The more niche communities seem to still be pretty good (and I do still enjoy engaging in them). But the subs like ask Reddit, Aita and the relationships one? Yea, it all feels like bs.
I stay away from any big subs now. The smaller stuff that tends to have 2 to 15 posts a day (like game specific subs) feel like they did before. Although I really feel a lot of those are going to discord as well.
Yea same. Now that you mention that, gaming really is one of the only reasons I’m on there anymore. Destiny for example, still has a pretty active sub. But to your point, the couple discord groups I’ve joined over the past couple years are way better.
I think it's due to the fact that a lot of mods left and the API changes made it harder to auto moderate subs.
If only the niche communities over here were a bit more active. For instance, I've been hyperfixating on Tamagotchi, but there isn't a Tamagotchi community here yet :(
for real!! im also currently fixated on tamagotchis and the tamagotchi sub is the only active community i could find, im pretty sure tamatalk has been dead for a while :[
You should make one!
I used to call out bots sometimes about 2-3 years ago and I can tell you it already was like this. The only difference is the addition of AI, but early bot networks just used Google translate back and forth to copy entire old posts without being noticed.
They often just copy highly upvoted answers to threads they deem as related
That's true but those bot networks were easy to find with reverse search. There were different types of bots and the clever ones went under the radar easily.
A lot of them are using old, pre-AI tactics, too, going by the image.
remember when they banned bots on r/mademesmile or something and there were no posts anymore?
Wasn't that just recently?
Wholesome memes, actually.
How could mods ban all the bots posing as human users?
Why is this a JPEG. I barely can read that text in red.
Maybe your client? Renders clear and legible for me
dark red on grey
I have tried to read that text on my desktop PC, so I was visiting regular site, but I must say that the picture is much clearer on my phone.
I guess it's mostly because my gaming monitor is not that good at displaying colors or some other shit.
Needs more JPEG
Askreddit was a scummy Karma farm already. This still sucks, though.
The worst part is that they're all really fucking bland questions. The shit you'd see on Facebook.
They're engagement fodder designed to elicit human responses to provide a larger training dataset for future LLMs. That and to drive up Reddit usage and engagement numbers.
What's your favorite Iron Man scene from any of the Marvel Movies?
Fun thing to do is when you realize 99% of the internet is just advertising teams working for these rich fucking A hole's, is you make them work for their money but posting things that PR companies would hate. Just culture jam the hell out of the dead internet. Its the only way to be. Its what makes places like r/joerogan and r/thefighterandthekid so much fun.
When you start seen memes from the same IP all of sudden...
Can you provide examples?
Examples of what? Marketing teams? Check out a company called bent pixels.
To see it in action, check out r/marvel.
As far as culture jamming it goes, I don't have many because it gets your account banned pretty fast.
Site wide ban as well, not just a particular sub.
It’s funny how Reddit is banning more genuine people everyday and letting the bots run wild.
It'll get worse everywhere in the internet until we return to books and printed media again because we don't know what's fake and what's real
just quote one here, or make one up. I also am curious to know what "culture jamming" even means.
Because I was also curious. In short, I think it's essentially saying shit that calls out advertising bullshit in an overt way while using the format that advertisers do.
Kinda like the magic glasses in the old movie "they live" but more colorful. Image for context:
Thank you - but I am somewhat oblivious how the poster that mentioned this term thought that this would "get your account banned" fast.
Yeah I have no clue on that honestly. I feel like I see that kind of thing happen on Reddit and here frequently enough, and my experience has not been seeing people get banned about it.
So there's trolling which is just being a dick. Culture jamming is more about sending a message by using a lot of weird social behaviour and culture norms to throw a wrench into the mix. Sacha Baron Cohen did a bit of it more satirized. But the kings were "yes men saved the world"
Wow. This is absolutely awesome work. Kudos to The Yes Men. Fuck megacorporations and fuck this dystopian capitalism we live in.
Thank you for this great illustration, and I am all for it (culture jamming) if that's how it's done properly.
Oh yeah, AskReddit went to shit a while ago. It used to be my favourite subreddit, but it changed about 5 years ago I think.
Why isn’t lemmy taken over with bots yet? Is it just a matter of time?
Everyone on lemmy is a bot except you.
There's currently (*comparatively) no money to be made with bots given Lemmy's comparatively small size, I'd wager. Bots on Reddit are used to advertise and to push companies' agendas. Lemmy's too small for that
There is definitely money to be made. Whether it is shilling for a product or even attempting to inflate market share in the hopes of converting said market share into either donations or outright selling to investors.
Yeah, I don't think they have figured out how to properly manipulate lemmy yet (I have seen a shocking amount of facebook "why don't these kinds of posts go viral" levels of nonsense, for example). But bots are cheap and to pretend that there is not an active effort to figure out how to manipulate us is naivety, at best.
Maybe it is just that I am an old. I watched reddit fall. Hell, I watched fucking gamefaqs "fall". Not to mention usenet and the rest. Because the reality is that where there are people, there is money. And modern day advertisement techniques (whether it is AI bots or just people in a warehouse in the global south) are increasingly cheap.
Well, not literally no money to be made but compared to reddit, I meant. But you're absolutely right.
If Lemmy had the numbers Reddit does, we'd have more bots. I expect our admins are more responsive and more willing to take risks (like banning legit users when they're a false positive for a bot). But the APIs available also make bots easier.
The longer term solution is probably a paid instance and/or identify verification. A one-time fee of $5-15 would significantly hinder bots and help the fediverse to be sustainable. It means bans stick much better, and slows cheap bots from having infinite attempts to achieve indistinguishably.
Identity verification comes with its own problems, but they may be workable. People don't want to post under their real names, but that information doesn't need to be revealed. It could be possible to have regional instances that verify and publish only your general location, such as state or county.
We have a bot problem, but we also have admins/ mods that don't want to bloat their numbers with bots (mostly). The fediverse helps us hold each other accountable, and if any community is full of bots, you defedirate them. I don't mind the auto posters that seed content. I like the OSRS update bot, etc...
Indeed. It’s a problem for any online platform, but the hope is that it’s a self-limiting problem here because of the natural segmentation of the network and given than admins aren’t trying to sell advertisement views.
Beep boop
Oh fuck I blew my cover
My guess is we're still too small and niche to be a tempting target.
I think the federated nature of lemmy will make it an easy target when it does come along though.
Disclaimer: I don't really know what I'm talking about.
Edit: Spelling
There are bots and astroturfers on Lemmy now to be clear, just not nearly to the point of the disaster that is R-town. That said, it's not nearly as bad. The point i wanted to make is that federation is the one thing protecting Lemmy from corporate bot/shill takeover. The way Lemmy will be reddit'd/digg'd would be if centralization of servers became high enough that corpo corrupted ones become the defacto servers, who'd cut federation with the smaller privately-owned instances we currently enjoy.
Just got a random message from a new account I suspect of being a bot or scammer.
But lemmy is still small enough, and has mods/admins that are less jaded and defeated than the bigger platforms, that there is a bigger pushback on the scams.
Every site has a critical mass at which scammers will be more motivated than the moderators. Reddit got too big, then shit all over the experienced mods. Double whammy.
Hold on just a darn tootin’ minute here. That there’s robot speak, ain’t it? We don’t take too kindly to robots, fella. Are you a robot, or ain’t you? We’ll defederate you mercifully.
It kind of is, but mostly scripts to post to multiple communities and instances at the same time, at the beginning people said we needed content at any cost, now? I guess we still do?
But it's rare to see someone post once and letting it federate, they rather post it everywhere (even if sometimes it barely fits a community) and get their sweet upvotes.
Crossposting was supposed to help but sometimes I still see the crosspost and the original post for whatever reason.
This is specially notable for news communities, meme/shitposting (constantly reposting the same things, sometimes even with the reddit watermark) and the nsfw instance (which is basically full of sellers and their cringe commenting bots).
Because there's no value in it at the moment. Reddit accounts sell for quite a bit of money as they can be used for marketing or propaganda.
WHY ARE YOU YELLING
There's little potential here and we ban them quick enough.
can i get more schadenfreude on this 🍿. its delicious
Reddit is a cesspool.
I would almost be okay with a proffer that it is bots asking the questions, but that the discourse is between human beings. That's all I really care about. It's rare that I respond directly to OP, or at least I do so less frequently than I'm responding to someone in the comments.
I remember back in the early days on forums, sometimes they'd just feel dead, and it was mainly a lack of content (threads). Once a thread would open, us morons behind keyboards could talk it to death, or more likely just divert in perpetuity.
That's a really good use for bots, since new users haven't seen the best posts and may actually enjoy discussing them. Older users can simply move on, filter from their stream if they get bored of it.
the average redditor will still insist on appending "Reddit" onto Google searches since it "lets them see real human opinions" only because they can't discern obvious botting from genuine human interactions
A lot of the botting is just copy and pasting previous actual human topics and comments though, so they're not really wrong.
Actual bot created content is pretty boring, and never "contributes" in a way that would make for a useful Google result. Your Google result may be a bot's comment, but if that comment is answering a question of some kind there's a 99% chance the comment was originally written by a human.
copying and pasting a comment is still less genuine, since that promotes stale and outdated information. It can also create the false idea of a "widely held" opinion rather than a single person's opinion copied a dozen times.
Well, obviously. But I don't give a shit about that when I just want a solution to a problem.
promotes stale and outdated information. It can also create the false idea of a “widely held” opinion
Clue
The content of bots (the desired ones) is at least not banned or removed by anyone. For example, I feel socially excluded by the Reddit and para-Reddit communities because whenever I write something a bit more controversial, it immediately ends up in the trash.
but I the real human get permanently banned from all of reddit for "ban evasion" (I deleted my account to change my name and accidentally posted a comment over a month later) and my appeal gets denied in 2 hours 🙃
There was some nsfw bots I saw and some.karma farm bots some accounts looked like real users one of them only posted purely on that subreddit
They buy real accounts with established histories and karma. I even had a DM about selling my account for $200 in BTC a few years back. Probably would have if I didn't like my user name.
makes sense but i remember i saw peoples dms they say wild nsfw stuff and one time someone dmed me a dagger for sale
I never got anything other than spam for DMs.
Alwayshasbeen.jpg
u/Always-Hasbeen2674
No offence to anyone here but fuck Reddit!
So.... I could sell my Reddit Account? 10 Years 20K+ Karma, any bids?
/s
I'll give you one up vote.
That was true a decade ago
Ever since the War Lizard Gaming Forum shutdown Reddit has been 99% bot content
AskReddit was a junk pit anyway, so it would not be a loss, even if it wasn't reddit.
Two questions:
How can you be sure they're bots?
Assuming you can be sure (which I entirely doubt), how do you detect and ban them in a way they can't come back?
You're not banning anything. Reddit runs the bots
Oh no!
Anyway.
Honestly though. No one really cared about the original post anyways. The comments are the actual content.
AskReddit is just simple mindless enjoyment to pass the time, nothing wrong with that.
FTFY
It's still okay for niche communities, and that's probably why people still go there
This for sure. It's something severely lacking at Lemmy, without the large user base the small communities can't sustain the way they do on Reddit. Lemmy serves best as a replacement for the biggest subs.
I noticed I'm not even missing the small subs anymore.
4 different meme subs about an obscure Romanian soap opera don't improve my quality of life.
Memes no, but I've found a lot of value in things like my hometown has a pretty active sub on Reddit which is useful for local information or subs around specific TV shows or video games bring a lot of interesting discussion or just asking questions on niche topics I'm much more likely to get an answer from a larger user base.
My home town subreddit has seen at least 1 news years eve orgy organised through it, havent seen anything comparable on lemmy!
Hobby subs are the big one. If your hobby is anything other than dicking around with Linux, we probably don't have much of a community for it, if we have one at all.
Truth. RVs and sailboats are not here. But I feel confident I’d get all the discussion I need if I wanted to install Linux on my sailboat.
Have you considered a Framework sailboat? They're a little more expensive, but they're designed with repairability in mind, and come with Linux pre-installed
Framework sailboats are overpriced garbage!!
You would be better off with a thinkboat x61s
In all honesty the lack of super specific and active communities on lemmy has actually improved my quality of life. I spend much, much less time scrolling and reading shit.
It's a valid point, but it's kind of like saying it's great that the restaurant you've started going to has such a small menu compared to the old one because you're not eating as much.
I'm a picky eater so yeah that works for me
The user volume to support niche communities is the most obvious thing missing in Lemmy. But I have a darker view of the future. Picture LLM bots forging organic-looking conversations that result in a product recommendation. It looks like a genuine human conversation, but it’s actually an advertisement. Maybe it’s mixed with some human comments, but that may only add to the realism of the fraud.
That kind of ”advertising“ could potentially command a lot of money. And it could probably eventually infect just about any text platform. Maybe Lemmy as well someday?
You could deploy it pretty effectively in sufficiently large niche communities.
You are too late
Thanks for the confirmation. Ugh.
Yep I can confirm, I lived in my tiny reddit bubble a lot of time to care about trending shit and bots stuff.
Exactly. In specific communities it's by far the best discussion platform. And I don't go to a site first discussion second, other way around, so to reddit I go for those.
People go there because they don't care about interacting with other human beings. They just want an echo chamber and to occasionally feel like they are an Influencer.
And you can see the same at lemmy. Someone posts something someone doesn't like? Immediate downvote (and, for the more pathetic people, downvoting on a few alts as well) with no comment or even attempt to refute things other than MAYBE an ad hominem. And plenty of "What is your favorite X" spam-engagement posts that just involve repeating whatever marketing schpiel they heard in the past.
There has been a recent tendency for people to reference social media network sites that are nothing but bots and... it is increasingly obvious that that is what most people want. They want to feel like they are the tastemakers. They want to be moistcritical without needing to focus test the most normy of center-right takes.
Well, yeah. That is what the button is for.
It's supposed to be for bad faith posts/comments not just for disagreement
I downvote comments that promote hateful ideologies, whether or no they were posted in bad faith. I also downvote posts that derail the conversation, whether or not I think they were posted in bad faith because it is impossible to know if someone is posting in good faith from an individual post. By the time a pattern is clear the thread is derailed.
Context also matters, because the same post about grilled mushrooms as a substitute for grilled steaks will be posted in good faith to different posts and be a net positive or negative depending on the post. A post about grilling in general? Positive, because it adds to the topic! A post about the best cut of beef for grilling? Negative, because it derails the thread to be about not eating beef.
Sure, people should not be downvoting non-important topics or views that they could just block instead. But a lot of people also assume bad faith when someone disagrees with them, so that isn't good criteria either.
Those are also good reasons, i.e. more than just "I disagree"
It's supposed to be for whatever the fuck you want to use it for. There's no downvote police on lemmy.
Personally, I upvote every reply I get and nothing else.
Ultimately, it's supposed to be used to make post/comments less visible, for whatever reason.
And it doesn't really have much of an effect on lemmy at all.
Sick burn and true, we have so few comments that we read all of them anyway.
Sometimes it seems like Lemmy users sort by most negative first just so they can keep dogpiling on the comments with negative vote score.
Which is a Reddit behaviour, and probably came from whatever existed before Reddit too.
Yeah, I mean, sort by controversial is there for a reason.
Yes, it's good to realise that lemmy is just as much an echo chamber as reddit is. Same echoes, differnet voice. But don't you dare actually having a different voice, that will not be appreciate. People want to have discussions, but only with yes men.
stop saying the truth. it hurts their feelings.
Using this low of a contrast (dark red on dark background) is criminal. Maybe my eyes are just that bad but good lord those notes are hard to read
This just proves that OP is not a bot, he is a dumb human like us
It's not even mine, I put the source in the post.
But I agree with the poor colour choice
After this comment I am exactly 27.3% more suspicious of OP being a bot after all.
Not necessarily. Bots can read text equally well on any colour. This might prove he is a bot.
In any case, a crime has been committed. Call the cops.
Yeah it's awful. My vision is pretty good but this literally hurts to look at
Gather round, children, and let me tell you a story of the same type of mindless corporate stupidity that happened in my state, about how something successful was ruined because all they could see was at the surface level...
When the mini-market chain AM/PM opened some stores in Baja California, they came up with a hybrid concept that also included a made-to-order fast food kitchen serving burgers, and a sizable seating area, they called this Dave's Kitchen. It was a huge, huge hit.
Enter 7-11 into the scene. Getting wind of this new phenomenon and armed with corporate cash from their Mexico offices in... Monterrey I think it was... they bought every AM/PM in the state and converted them to 7-11s, surely salivating at the prospect of this large client base that was supposedly built-in with their acquisition.
So what was the first thing they did?
They shuttered Dave's Kitchen. Poof... gone!
They got rid of the soda machine, the ice cream machine... instead of assimilating the business model of what they had bought, they got rid of everything that made these AM/PMs unique in the market, replaced it with their own bland and generic way of doing things according to the home office in Monterrey.
Within a month, the new 7-11s had lost around 3/4 of their customers. Their emergency response was to send in a squad of corporate poll takers to pester the customers still there and see... why the other ones had gone, I guess?
Asking the wrong questions (why did the customers leave in droves?) to the wrong people (the few remaining clients who didn't leave). And thus, nothing of value was learned, because when your corporate business school suits are clumsy unthinking hammers, every situation and problem look like a goddamned nail.
Gather round children; as I tell you the story of Georgie Pie, it offered cheap local (to NZ) fast food, in this case meat and sweet pies.
Highly successful and well loved, it was a common sight across the country. Unfortunately, the corporate entities from off shore came in, diluting the fast food dollar across many more options. MacDonald's brought the struggling Georgie Pie; mainly for its locations and to remove a competitor from the market.
Every few years; to maintain the trade mark, MacDonald's runs a Georgie Pie promotion where you can get a pie from MacDonald's. It is like the zombie of local "cuisine" reanimated over and over again to server its master; for the only job it is good for.
Now this truly does sound like a horrifying story.
Move over McRib, 'cause here comes Georgie "Please Let Me Die" Pie, even less often than you do!
Imagine if McDonald's had actually defeated Jollibee in the Philippines, absorbed them, then resuscitated their menu once a year.
But that didn't happen, I wonder how did Jollibee not only survive, but thrive? What was their crucial chessboard move there?
Perhaps they realized it would be cheaper to stop the growth of a superior product. Especially when that superior product would likely require more types of costs that would eat corporate level profit. More higher paid employees that can't be mechanized.
Status quo is incredibly profitable, assuming nothing threatens it. That's why big business does everything they can to increase the barrier of entry, and happily overpays to buy out successful competitors, with the leadership of the competitors having enforceable noncompetes for the model.
The fact that they polled customers afterwards points to this being a simple corporate fuckup. This kind of thing regularly happens as well where I live despite noncompetes basically not being enforceable.
Acquiring companies is easy, but it extremely rarely goes well. The incentives and skills required to buy something and give a sales pitch to a private equity firm simply do not overlap with the incentives and skills required to vertically integrate that thing without completely destroying it.
In many ways these corporate ghouls are like serial hobbyists. Buying all kinds of expensive toys and tools they don't understand then breaking them and/or giving up.
Obviously absolute speculation on my part, but if they were truly doing what I suggested intentionally, part of the plan would need to be plausible deniability to avoid anti-monopoly issues, and also public sentiment nightmare. Killing your favorite shop out of incompetence doesn't win good will, but you will still go there. Doing it out of malicious intent could have people in other states joining a boycott.
I'm in management, participated in the acquisition process of the company I'm at being acquired. At least at the 150mm/year revenue level there's no one doing the shit I'm suggesting, no one is so competent. Cash on hand is bad , acquisition is an obvious way to deal with that. You're spot on about skills though, 95% of management at every level is totally incompetent at the work required to actually do management shit. All the competent people leave as soon as they can because the work just got way harder and the money doesn't follow.
Yes, this is my thought as well. They bought their way into the market, somehow thinking it was the chunk of real estate and not the services provided that kept customers coming back over and over again. They didn't even bother to see what these services were, came in like a bull in a china shop, indifferent to the point of oblivious about it, even as the accounting department back at the home office had to process out all the kitchen equipment, the self-service soda and ice cream machines, etc., from every store in Baja.
Nowadays, 7-11 is still there, puttering along, as a generic clone of Oxxo, the other large mini-market chain in Mexico, offering nothing special, except maybe along the lines of - "Hmm... Oxxo is three blocks this way, 7-11 is one block that way, I guess I'll go to 7-11", and Oxxos are everywhere, Jesus... like somebody gleefully abused the copy/paste function.
AM/PM honestly sounds like what the Sheetz chain does these days in a lot of ways.
News flash: it’s not just ask Reddit. It’s Reddit entirely. That place is a shithole of bots.
The only good answers I find to things are 3+ years old.
Yeah. That or niche subreddits that just aren’t popular enough to warrant bots. Like specific game communities. But even some of the big ones are full of bots.
Beep, boop! I am a bot, and this action was performed naturally.
Am I really a bot though?
Ok this red on black contrast is awful on the eyes.
I look forward to meeting my undeleted zombie Reddit account one day. I'm picturing it like Shaun and Ed at the end of Shaun of the Dead.
I'm almost tempted to turn off 2fa on my account and give it a weak password just to see what its next life becomes.
It's remarkable, the questions that aren't from bots are completely indistinguishable.
It's all low quality engagement bait, and all these questions were on the front page of askreddit a hundred times with slight variations.
They're indistinguishable because they're copied from top-voted posts that are a few years old (title, text, and image if applicable). It's guaranteed to produce a post that fits the community and gets a lot of engagement, so it's a cheap and effective way to mature a bot account. Once you start looking for it, it's everywhere, and Reddit admins don't care.
Have you ever noticed those low effort reposts also getting the same top 10 comments as the original? It's slop all the way down.
What’s the aim? What do they use the accounts for once they’ve acquired the karma, which I am assume is the goal.
I'm speculating, but my guesses are:
Once mature, it's usually used for spam or astroturfing. There is a noticeable uptick around big elections, wars, etc.
I saw one repost-bot that metastisized into the most vile porn-spam-bot you can imagine, but they're usually more subtle than that.
Advertising or scams usually. A high amount of posts, comments, and karma makes an account look trustworthy.
Thanks
how are people so bad with colors
Pissing off all their best users sure was a fantastic idea.
I've never understood what anyone gets out of hosting and spamming reddit with bots
Selling accounts with high karma to people wanting to push an agenda with a seemingly legit account
Conspiracy hat on:
It's done by Reddit themselves. They know user visits are dropping. They know power users have slipped. To avoid making it look like a desert, they have bots create content.
Reddit's origin story is sockpuppeting as users.
They'll do it again
The difference between now and then though, is they were a private company.
Unless they disclose they use bots to post content and make the site look active, any use of user count and engagement for any aspect of the company becomes fraud as its misleading investors.
Oh we have 1 million posts an hour! Fraud.
Oh we have 100 million monthly active users! Fraud!
Investors Q/A - do you use bots? Answer No. Fraud.
Fraud doesn't really stop a big company, if they can get away with it.
Facebook for example.
And whose to say it's not them directly, but a "third party who Reddit pays for user acquisition" services?
They can pay a random LLC to do it for them.
Q&A do you use bots to generate content or have you used any 3rd party that uses bots themselves directly or through another party.
As long as its asked and it gets leaked they lied it's fraud.
Plausible deniability doesn't work if proof comes out.
You don't hire a hitman and get off scott free when proof comes out you hired a hitman.
Conspiracy: Reddit sells bots and bot acquired analytics to high paying corpos, but are losing sales to secondary markets undercutting the reddit sold bots.
The 9Gag way...
My friend still uses reddit
Mature accounts with some activity are worth money to people looking to AstroTurf political discussions.
Not just political, it helps brands advertise as well
How much can I make with a 10 yo account with average karma? Where can i sell it?
Web queries work best, first two results
https://www.playerup.com/accounts/redditaccount/
https://swapd.co/c/social-media/buy-sell-reddit/99
But look around and see a place that you feel comfortable with
Even ebay works
Huh, even the most "aged" and high-karma accounts seem to top out under $1k, average for a well-used account seems $300-500, and most for way less. Wonder how many sales are actually made.
I haven't thought about Reddit since the mod ban but aren't people being paid to make content? So could be mass farming nickels?
If reddit hadn't locked their API behind absurd paywalls, it would have been a cool project to try to make a browser plugin that gives accounts a "credit score" based on the factors you've been looking at, in order to let users quickly judge how likely an account is a bot.
It could let people adjust the metrics it uses to calculate that score in the settings, so even if it becomes popular enough for bots to start trying to game the system, people can adapt their scoring metrics themselves and share config profiles that they think are more effective at rating bots.
Might be something cool to see for activitypub/fediverse/lemmy accounts, but with the data available varying by instance it might be a little harder to calibrate a "catch-all" scoring config
A lot of the site feels like it’s been overrun by bots. The more niche communities seem to still be pretty good (and I do still enjoy engaging in them). But the subs like ask Reddit, Aita and the relationships one? Yea, it all feels like bs.
I stay away from any big subs now. The smaller stuff that tends to have 2 to 15 posts a day (like game specific subs) feel like they did before. Although I really feel a lot of those are going to discord as well.
Yea same. Now that you mention that, gaming really is one of the only reasons I’m on there anymore. Destiny for example, still has a pretty active sub. But to your point, the couple discord groups I’ve joined over the past couple years are way better.
I think it's due to the fact that a lot of mods left and the API changes made it harder to auto moderate subs.
If only the niche communities over here were a bit more active. For instance, I've been hyperfixating on Tamagotchi, but there isn't a Tamagotchi community here yet :(
for real!! im also currently fixated on tamagotchis and the tamagotchi sub is the only active community i could find, im pretty sure tamatalk has been dead for a while :[
You should make one!
I used to call out bots sometimes about 2-3 years ago and I can tell you it already was like this. The only difference is the addition of AI, but early bot networks just used Google translate back and forth to copy entire old posts without being noticed.
They often just copy highly upvoted answers to threads they deem as related
That's true but those bot networks were easy to find with reverse search. There were different types of bots and the clever ones went under the radar easily.
A lot of them are using old, pre-AI tactics, too, going by the image.
remember when they banned bots on r/mademesmile or something and there were no posts anymore?
Wasn't that just recently?
Wholesome memes, actually.
How could mods ban all the bots posing as human users?
Why is this a JPEG. I barely can read that text in red.
Maybe your client? Renders clear and legible for me
dark red on grey
I have tried to read that text on my desktop PC, so I was visiting regular site, but I must say that the picture is much clearer on my phone.
I guess it's mostly because my gaming monitor is not that good at displaying colors or some other shit.
Needs more JPEG
Askreddit was a scummy Karma farm already. This still sucks, though.
The worst part is that they're all really fucking bland questions. The shit you'd see on Facebook.
They're engagement fodder designed to elicit human responses to provide a larger training dataset for future LLMs. That and to drive up Reddit usage and engagement numbers.
What's your favorite Iron Man scene from any of the Marvel Movies?
Fun thing to do is when you realize 99% of the internet is just advertising teams working for these rich fucking A hole's, is you make them work for their money but posting things that PR companies would hate. Just culture jam the hell out of the dead internet. Its the only way to be. Its what makes places like r/joerogan and r/thefighterandthekid so much fun.
When you start seen memes from the same IP all of sudden...
Can you provide examples?
Examples of what? Marketing teams? Check out a company called bent pixels.
To see it in action, check out r/marvel.
As far as culture jamming it goes, I don't have many because it gets your account banned pretty fast.
Site wide ban as well, not just a particular sub.
It’s funny how Reddit is banning more genuine people everyday and letting the bots run wild.
It'll get worse everywhere in the internet until we return to books and printed media again because we don't know what's fake and what's real
just quote one here, or make one up. I also am curious to know what "culture jamming" even means.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_jamming
Because I was also curious. In short, I think it's essentially saying shit that calls out advertising bullshit in an overt way while using the format that advertisers do.
Kinda like the magic glasses in the old movie "they live" but more colorful. Image for context:
Thank you - but I am somewhat oblivious how the poster that mentioned this term thought that this would "get your account banned" fast.
Yeah I have no clue on that honestly. I feel like I see that kind of thing happen on Reddit and here frequently enough, and my experience has not been seeing people get banned about it.
https://youtu.be/LiWlvBro9eI?si=VE9hlntEkOLWZrlo
So there's trolling which is just being a dick. Culture jamming is more about sending a message by using a lot of weird social behaviour and culture norms to throw a wrench into the mix. Sacha Baron Cohen did a bit of it more satirized. But the kings were "yes men saved the world"
Wow. This is absolutely awesome work. Kudos to The Yes Men. Fuck megacorporations and fuck this dystopian capitalism we live in.
Thank you for this great illustration, and I am all for it (culture jamming) if that's how it's done properly.
Oh yeah, AskReddit went to shit a while ago. It used to be my favourite subreddit, but it changed about 5 years ago I think.
Why isn’t lemmy taken over with bots yet? Is it just a matter of time?
Everyone on lemmy is a bot except you.
There's currently (*comparatively) no money to be made with bots given Lemmy's comparatively small size, I'd wager. Bots on Reddit are used to advertise and to push companies' agendas. Lemmy's too small for that
There is definitely money to be made. Whether it is shilling for a product or even attempting to inflate market share in the hopes of converting said market share into either donations or outright selling to investors.
Yeah, I don't think they have figured out how to properly manipulate lemmy yet (I have seen a shocking amount of facebook "why don't these kinds of posts go viral" levels of nonsense, for example). But bots are cheap and to pretend that there is not an active effort to figure out how to manipulate us is naivety, at best.
Maybe it is just that I am an old. I watched reddit fall. Hell, I watched fucking gamefaqs "fall". Not to mention usenet and the rest. Because the reality is that where there are people, there is money. And modern day advertisement techniques (whether it is AI bots or just people in a warehouse in the global south) are increasingly cheap.
Well, not literally no money to be made but compared to reddit, I meant. But you're absolutely right.
If Lemmy had the numbers Reddit does, we'd have more bots. I expect our admins are more responsive and more willing to take risks (like banning legit users when they're a false positive for a bot). But the APIs available also make bots easier.
The longer term solution is probably a paid instance and/or identify verification. A one-time fee of $5-15 would significantly hinder bots and help the fediverse to be sustainable. It means bans stick much better, and slows cheap bots from having infinite attempts to achieve indistinguishably.
Identity verification comes with its own problems, but they may be workable. People don't want to post under their real names, but that information doesn't need to be revealed. It could be possible to have regional instances that verify and publish only your general location, such as state or county.
We have a bot problem, but we also have admins/ mods that don't want to bloat their numbers with bots (mostly). The fediverse helps us hold each other accountable, and if any community is full of bots, you defedirate them. I don't mind the auto posters that seed content. I like the OSRS update bot, etc...
Indeed. It’s a problem for any online platform, but the hope is that it’s a self-limiting problem here because of the natural segmentation of the network and given than admins aren’t trying to sell advertisement views.
Beep boop
Oh fuck I blew my cover
My guess is we're still too small and niche to be a tempting target.
I think the federated nature of lemmy will make it an easy target when it does come along though.
Disclaimer: I don't really know what I'm talking about.
Edit: Spelling
There are bots and astroturfers on Lemmy now to be clear, just not nearly to the point of the disaster that is R-town. That said, it's not nearly as bad. The point i wanted to make is that federation is the one thing protecting Lemmy from corporate bot/shill takeover. The way Lemmy will be reddit'd/digg'd would be if centralization of servers became high enough that corpo corrupted ones become the defacto servers, who'd cut federation with the smaller privately-owned instances we currently enjoy.
Just got a random message from a new account I suspect of being a bot or scammer.
But lemmy is still small enough, and has mods/admins that are less jaded and defeated than the bigger platforms, that there is a bigger pushback on the scams.
Every site has a critical mass at which scammers will be more motivated than the moderators. Reddit got too big, then shit all over the experienced mods. Double whammy.
How do you know I'm not a bot? :)
01001001 00100111 01101101 00100000 01100001 00100000 01110010 01100101 01100001 01101100 00100000 01101000 01110101 01101101 01100001 01101110
Hold on just a darn tootin’ minute here. That there’s robot speak, ain’t it? We don’t take too kindly to robots, fella. Are you a robot, or ain’t you? We’ll defederate you mercifully.
Why do you assume it's not happening already?
It kind of is, but mostly scripts to post to multiple communities and instances at the same time, at the beginning people said we needed content at any cost, now? I guess we still do?
But it's rare to see someone post once and letting it federate, they rather post it everywhere (even if sometimes it barely fits a community) and get their sweet upvotes. Crossposting was supposed to help but sometimes I still see the crosspost and the original post for whatever reason.
This is specially notable for news communities, meme/shitposting (constantly reposting the same things, sometimes even with the reddit watermark) and the nsfw instance (which is basically full of sellers and their cringe commenting bots).
Because there's no value in it at the moment. Reddit accounts sell for quite a bit of money as they can be used for marketing or propaganda.
WHY ARE YOU YELLING
There's little potential here and we ban them quick enough.
can i get more schadenfreude on this 🍿. its delicious
Reddit is a cesspool.
I would almost be okay with a proffer that it is bots asking the questions, but that the discourse is between human beings. That's all I really care about. It's rare that I respond directly to OP, or at least I do so less frequently than I'm responding to someone in the comments.
I remember back in the early days on forums, sometimes they'd just feel dead, and it was mainly a lack of content (threads). Once a thread would open, us morons behind keyboards could talk it to death, or more likely just divert in perpetuity.
That's a really good use for bots, since new users haven't seen the best posts and may actually enjoy discussing them. Older users can simply move on, filter from their stream if they get bored of it.
the average redditor will still insist on appending "Reddit" onto Google searches since it "lets them see real human opinions" only because they can't discern obvious botting from genuine human interactions
A lot of the botting is just copy and pasting previous actual human topics and comments though, so they're not really wrong.
Actual bot created content is pretty boring, and never "contributes" in a way that would make for a useful Google result. Your Google result may be a bot's comment, but if that comment is answering a question of some kind there's a 99% chance the comment was originally written by a human.
copying and pasting a comment is still less genuine, since that promotes stale and outdated information. It can also create the false idea of a "widely held" opinion rather than a single person's opinion copied a dozen times.
Well, obviously. But I don't give a shit about that when I just want a solution to a problem.
Clue
The content of bots (the desired ones) is at least not banned or removed by anyone. For example, I feel socially excluded by the Reddit and para-Reddit communities because whenever I write something a bit more controversial, it immediately ends up in the trash.
but I the real human get permanently banned from all of reddit for "ban evasion" (I deleted my account to change my name and accidentally posted a comment over a month later) and my appeal gets denied in 2 hours 🙃
There was some nsfw bots I saw and some.karma farm bots some accounts looked like real users one of them only posted purely on that subreddit
They buy real accounts with established histories and karma. I even had a DM about selling my account for $200 in BTC a few years back. Probably would have if I didn't like my user name.
makes sense but i remember i saw peoples dms they say wild nsfw stuff and one time someone dmed me a dagger for sale
I never got anything other than spam for DMs.
Alwayshasbeen.jpg
u/Always-Hasbeen2674
No offence to anyone here but fuck Reddit!
So.... I could sell my Reddit Account? 10 Years 20K+ Karma, any bids?
/s
I'll give you one up vote.
That was true a decade ago
Ever since the War Lizard Gaming Forum shutdown Reddit has been 99% bot content
AskReddit was a junk pit anyway, so it would not be a loss, even if it wasn't reddit.
Two questions:
You're not banning anything. Reddit runs the bots
Oh no!
Anyway.
Honestly though. No one really cared about the original post anyways. The comments are the actual content.
AskReddit is just simple mindless enjoyment to pass the time, nothing wrong with that.
The theory of the empty internet is looming. ;)