this post was submitted on 11 Mar 2024
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Asklemmy
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Only if you count bots lol
Yeah this isn't Reddit but more than 80% (>4/5) of Twitter is bots. It's to the point where you can find any blue checkmark account, reply to them with a prompt, and more likely than not they'll have a wacky and clearly autogenerated response. Sometimes they just reply things like "sorry, I can't generate content that depicts violence" to random posts too.
Dead internet theory is almost a reality and I hate it. It's already happened to Google search results / blogs.
Almost? It’s been a thing for awhile. Shit, Reddit got started by using bots to feign engagement. It’s just that it’s gotten so much easier and faster
I had my Reddit very heavily curated, my subs were mostly smaller subreddits. I was incredibly active and had my settings so that anything I voted on would not appear on my homepage. I got to see a ton of posts because of that.
Around 2021, I started noticing that reposts weren't just people coming in and posting things we've seen a dozen times because they had no way to know it was a repost. It was bot networks that would take top posts and then other bot accounts would recreate the original post's comment section. The accounts followed patterns and became really obvious to spot after a while.
The original tells were the bots taking really specific posts that only made sense in that context. Popular post from last Christmas? The bot doesn't know what Christmas is, sees a popular post from a few months ago and reposts someone happy about their gifts in August. Look at this beautiful picture I took of the summer Alaskan wilderness this morning but it's February. The photography subreddits were obvious because the bots would rotate the picture a few degrees which would sometimes ruin the picture's aesthetic.
I'm not sure if it was just me spotting them easier or if they were really ramping up into 2022 but by the time they killed API access and I stopped using it, I think over 80% of posts were bots. Made leaving the site way easier.
Yeah, repost bots were out of control and places like freekarma4u helped them propagate for years with no interference from reddit. Would've been simple to shut that down if they were really worried about stopping bots but instead they ignored numerous reports, allowing the bots to run rampant.
Like Lemmy. Full with cross posting bots.
cross posting bots are a lot less problematic to me than bots designed to mimic human engagement to said cross posts
Lemmy is not even in the ballpark of oom that Reddit and western social media sits in. Lemmy has 40-50k real active users.
I’m doing my part!
No, you were not supposed to be the bot.
Bots are a fact of life, unfortunately.
Almost 50% of all internet traffic is bots.