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It’s already started. There was a technology post earlier that included an affiliate link to a big online retailer.
It won’t be long before Disney astroturfs the entertainment communities and car companies astroturf the tech communities. There is no way to prevent it without requiring a level of privacy invasion that most people would not welcome.
The fediverse is just as susceptible to this as every other platform. Now that Lemmy is counting users in the millions, the enshitifcation will begin. I just hope the communities figure out some novel way to mitigate it.
It won't be the enshittification that we're used to and that Cory Doctorow wrote about. The platform as a whole is unlikely to do that to us, although certain instances definitely will.
Instead, this will be more like an arms race. Bad actors (especially spammers) will try to force their content upon us, and we will do everything we can to block/prevent that. I'm including astroturfing as part of this, since it's being run by peer nodes (unaffiliated with the platform) instead of admins.
I hope you are right about better mechanisms to detect and control Astroturfing. It is what killed Reddit for me, not the whole API mess.
If you want a Reddit example, go look at the “Naked and Afraid” subreddit dedicated to the show. Almost all the activity is from accounts with the same semantic naming pattern and who have the same account pattern in terms of age and ratio of karma.
When you look at what is being posted, it is obvious that Discovery/Max paid some shitty social-media marketing company to “increase engagement”. They will post for a thing, against a thing, opened ended questions, etc. then all the other fake accounts pile in and respond. Creating comment chains 8-12 deep with fake comments to try and keep you “engaged” with their content.
The same thing will happen here. The Astroturfers don’t care about community standards, rules, “shame”, or accounts. They create and burn accounts by the hundreds of thousands. They also make money in this, so they will just continue to optimize for any criteria the fediverse uses to move content to “hot” visibility.
I haven’t seen a platform yet that has a good way to combat this.
Not to go too far down this rabbit hole, but it certainly sounds like bad actors. Where did the existing toolset fall short? Were there mods? Did they remove these posts/comments? Minimum account ages?
Once we identify the tools needed to fight the spam, they get deployed. If effective, the spammers move on to the next arms to push their wares. I know I saw a LOT of comments shortly before the end of Reddit that the parent was a karma-farming bot.
We will always be behind the curve, since it's the nature of being reactive, but hopefully we can keep the return low enough to make it not worth the effort for most.
I've already seen KFC astroturfing on Kbin.