PetrichorBias

This was a problem on reddit too. Anyone could create accounts - heck, I had 8 accounts:

one main, one alt, one "professional" (linked publicly on my website), and five for my bots (whose accounts were optimistically created, but were never properly run). I had all 8 accounts signed in on my third-party app and I could easily manipulate votes on the posts I posted.

I feel like this is what happened when you'd see posts with hundreds / thousands of upvotes but had only 20-ish comments.

There needs to be a better way to solve this, but I'm unsure if we truly can solve this. Botnets are a problem across all social media (my undergrad thesis many years ago was detecting botnets on Reddit using Graph Neural Networks).

Fwiw, I have only one Lemmy account.

Finally. The other day while I was on a call with my girlfriend, she received an emergency alert on her phone (in the US) and wasn't able to read it / find the message for some reason. Fearing the worst, I rushed to the city's emergency Twitter account to see any updates, only for twitter to ask me to f-ing log in.

What a terrible feeling to have while going to the password manager, hands trembling with fear trying to sign in to the bloody & now-bastardized platform. Thankfully, it was just something related to bad weather.

Oh man, this is something I definitely hope to never see again. I'm so tired of the unbelievable TIFUs, AITAs, and/or OffMyChests with thousands of upvotes that had obviously fake stories.

The worst one (in recent history) was that TIFU with the student who slept with their professor's daughter.

Part 1: https://libreddit.de/r/tifu/comments/1379pge/tifu_by_hooking_up_with_professors_daughter/

Part 2: https://libreddit.de/r/tifu/comments/137u9bk/tifupdate_by_hooking_up_with_professors_daughter/

Part 3: https://libreddit.de/r/tifu/comments/1391lmj/tifupdate_i_cuckolded_my_professor/

I hope this kind of bullshit never happens here.

Maybe you're right, but it just felt uncanny to see thousands of upvotes on a post with only a handful of comments. Maybe someone who active on the bot-detection subreddits can pitch in.

In my opinion, the biggest (and quite possibly most dangerous) problem is someone artificially pumping up their ideas. To all the users who sort by active / hot, this would be quite problematic.

I'd love to actually see some social media research groups actually consider how to detect and potentially eliminate this issue on Lemmy, considering Lemmy is quite new and is malleable at this point (compared to other social media). For example, if they think metric X may be a good idea to include in all metadata to increase chances of detection, then it may be possible to include this in the source code of posts / comments / activities.

I know a few professors and researchers who do research on social media and associated technologies, I'll go talk to them when they come to their office on Monday.

Was it hard to get this standardized back in the good ol' days?

Do you think it would be as easy to do it now? If not, what challenges and hurdles would a RFC have to overcome?

The last thing I know that was pretty "significant" is the GNU Terry Pratchett header (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_Pratchett#Death) and that was a community effort.

That's genuinely very cool. I wonder how many of them are duplicates (same link across different communities on different servers). Regardless, I'm pretty happy that it appears that Lemmy is quite active. It really does feel like reddit when you see posts with hundreds or even thousands of upvotes.

Huge thanks to the lemmy devs and instance admins.

I don't use wefwef, I use jerboa for android.

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You're right that it's probably easier (and more reliable) to call the city's emergency number. At that time, I knew that the Twitter account existed and had nearly-realtime emergency updates which is why I chose to check there. I'll check the city's website now to bookmark it for later - thanks for that idea :)

I don't think the idea is stupid, just poorly executed. From Reddir's POV, this makes sense (why wouldn't it?). They could have done this in a much better way.

One thing I'd like to suggest is to include the episode number in the post title alongside the "[SPOILER]" warning.

It may be obvious to us now that the spoiler is for the latest episode, but it becomes a bit of a problem for anyone watching in the future and is reading the sticky post and/or other posts related to that episode.

While I used to routinely binge-read manga or binge-watch anime, I very often went to the stickied post which had discussions about a particular chapter/episode. I felt that I was missing out on some fan art/discussions that had the spoiler tag because I didn't know which chapter/episode the spoiler was for.

Something as simple as [SPOILER] [S8E1] in the post title makes search easier.

Batman Begins.

https://youtu.be/LstIgtkEe50

I did it two or three times with 3-5 accounts (never all 8). I also used to ask my friends (N=~8) to upvote stuff too (yes, I was pathetic) and I wasn't warned/banned. This was five-six years ago.

The latter. I was making bots to collect data (for the previously-mentioned thesis) and to make some form of utility bots whenever I had ideas.

I once had an idea to make a community-driven tagging bot to tag images (like hashtags). This would have been useful for graph building and just general information-lookup. Sadly, the idea never came to fruition.