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Does anyone else notice an uptick of extreme troll accounts? (lemmy.world)

submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I swear, ~~every time~~ most of the time I see someone being particularly rude, ignorant, and inappropriate on a post (usually political in origin, or they swing it to being political) I click on their profile and see it has been created that same day.

They are only there to sow discord. Only to piss people off. Idk if we can just report them (for what?) but I'd like to try exposing them before responding and interacting..

I am guilty of gobbling up the bait. I've started looking at profiles of people that piss me off exceptionally and noticed they're burner bot loser accounts.

I guess i just want to say I've noticed it!

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

I think it's just very messed up, ultimately it doesn't work against the real nasty people Reddit claims to be going up against because those people have bot armies that monitor their astroturf accounts so they know when the shadowbans happen and dump the account to move on to the next ones. No this system disproportionately affects the people who aren't expecting it and probably don't even deserve it.

Also for braindead spammers it's actually a terrible strategy because spammers' purpose is both to annoy users and chew through your resources, even if they are shadowbanned and uploading multiple gigabytes of white noise they aren't annoying people but they are chewing through bandwidth and CDN storage. IMO that's not feasible long term, and wouldn't even be initially feasible for most Fediverse services, hence why most basically just don't do it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

Sure but also general trolls that are just trying to get an emotional rise just piss in wind thinking they aren't getting bait. It's that concept of not feeding the trolls.

Also comments are reddits bread and butter so processing a few extra aren't really impacting them and they are small to begin with. There is also the added bonus of it looks good on metrics for interactions.

I think assuming every troll has a bot army is greatly overestimating them, people are more underwhelming than even they like to admit. And seems like it could help with minor deviants but also I wonder if that would make them act up more and turn to more offensive ways of baiting an audience, but then you ban them.
Sort of like boiling a group down on purpose. A bit awful as you help nurture the problems to be more easy to remove.