Reddit isn’t trying though. Social media is hooked by big business interests and governments, and there is overlap there. I can spot influence agents, mechanized trolls, supported by bots, you can bet they could better with their tools and analytics.
As we’ve seen for the last ten years, social media only takes down bots/influence agencies researchers or others make impossible to ignore, and they’ve cut those researchers off from the information they were using to that effect. Now it’s only agencies the US government aligned groups highlight that will get removed, alleged Iranian, and the like, a bit player.
These inauthentic accounts vastly inflate their numbers, make advertising more valuable. Even as they make the sites less useful, and drive away real users, it’s also assumed that users have no where else to go so why push back on governments and big business ratfucking the sites that can hurt them in myriad ways?
Not until we build a fediverse that can get critical mass to take off will we see them fight for real people’s use of their site.
That assumes that Reddit actually wants to ban bots. But as long as they’re not too obvious, the bots are valuable to them, since they inflate the user count.
Could simply be that only 2 have been fully banned by Reddit but most have tons of subreddit bans and/or shadowbans. On the other hand, Reddit is such a cesspit these days I wouldn’t be too shocked if they just exist on Reddit shitposting slop
I hate the modern internet
Yeah, but at least this post is interesting; it shows how godawful humanity as a whole is at detecting bots in the wild.
2 out of 400 bad.
this doesn’t show how bad humans are at detecting bots
Reddit isn’t trying though. Social media is hooked by big business interests and governments, and there is overlap there. I can spot influence agents, mechanized trolls, supported by bots, you can bet they could better with their tools and analytics.
As we’ve seen for the last ten years, social media only takes down bots/influence agencies researchers or others make impossible to ignore, and they’ve cut those researchers off from the information they were using to that effect. Now it’s only agencies the US government aligned groups highlight that will get removed, alleged Iranian, and the like, a bit player.
These inauthentic accounts vastly inflate their numbers, make advertising more valuable. Even as they make the sites less useful, and drive away real users, it’s also assumed that users have no where else to go so why push back on governments and big business ratfucking the sites that can hurt them in myriad ways?
Not until we build a fediverse that can get critical mass to take off will we see them fight for real people’s use of their site.
That assumes that Reddit actually wants to ban bots. But as long as they’re not too obvious, the bots are valuable to them, since they inflate the user count.
“Bots? No, no, those are active users. They also don’t use adblockers, so they’ve better than regular users!”
Could simply be that only 2 have been fully banned by Reddit but most have tons of subreddit bans and/or shadowbans. On the other hand, Reddit is such a cesspit these days I wouldn’t be too shocked if they just exist on Reddit shitposting slop
I could be a bot eight now! How would I even know?
You might be a bot nine too for all we know