Needed a pickling mix recipe I remembered only vaguely, but before I navigated to the community that held it, I noticed how horrifically botted the front page was. I did a cursory account check of the posts on the top sort and found that nearly half of the front page was comprised of bot posts or bot boosted accounts. Which is, under no uncertain terms, horrific.
Lemmy has its issues, but how someone could see this toxic landfill and choose to plant their flag there, I don’t understand. Glad to be amongst the people who cannot tolerate this.
I have no doubt it’s mostly bots these days, but you can’t reply upon usernames as the evidence. For years before I left Reddit I used default generated usernames such as these to post anonymously.
It’s account age, percentage of high karma posts, and AI callouts in their most recent post that I looked for. I think the bottom of my pic has an autogen that seemed human on first glance.
What’s an ai callout? I looked up snack samurai based on you underlining them above and didn’t see anything odd other than the account was 1month old.
1 month, many back to back incredibly high karma posts on samurai. Boofing bleach might be able to help them Scrape by.
AI callouts, as in accusations by users, which I corroborated to the best of my personal ability, of being an AI managed account.
High Karma sounds like a bot army. I see a smaller version on Lemmy where some users, no matter how deep in a thread, always get 4 upvotes instantly.
If you know the lemmy users’ names, you can check for yourself whether they’re voting themselves up. Lemvotes.org. No hiding it here.
Edit: unless they’re .ml. .ml blocked the instance responsible for this
Bot armies aren’t users directly voting themselves. It’s a bunch of random IPs that are owned or paid to vote.
How does Lemvotes show if you upvoted yourself? I just looked at it and it doesn’t even show the IP of the voter which would cover the easiest abuse (multiple accounts on the same PC).
It doesn’t show any info of that sort, just account vote histories to reference. People here generally aren’t careful enough to hide it well.
Are you saying there’s a way to upvote yourself multiple times from your own account? Because Reddit doesn’t allow that at all.
There are possibly AIs automating the callouts in comments too since they grow statistically more probable.
The idea of chatbots calling out chatbots just makes me want to burn everything down.
I just left, I’d say 60-70% bots
You know moderators use bots to generate posts and vote up or down replies ? The karma points required to post on most subreddits are so high only the mods can post. And the moderators on Lemmy do the same, only they can only lock out users from their own sub. Reddit auto-generates user names when using Gmail or an Android phone.
I’m not making a statement that Reddit isn’t mostly bots. I’m just saying auto-generated names isn’t proof enough that there are.
true - i think there are less russian bots on lemmy now the userbase is so low
i guess the russian bots will ramp up again for the us elections