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For the threads with the older one on the left: https://lemmy.world/post/14859950
(Thank you @[email protected] )
My understanding of how this works is that that left one is real accounts making real comments, at least in the majority.
Then when the link gets reposted, either by a bot or naturally, potentially depending on the title, the bots scrape the old comments and post them.
It's content farming. And Reddit is probably okay with this.
The right one is the "real" accounts. Notice how the left one is newer and all the accounts have names ending with four digits, except where they aren't copies from the right.
No, the left one is older and most the names in the right contain four numbers.
What's going on here?
Maybe op updated the picture?
I did, because other people complained in another comment that it was confusing to not have the older thread on the left.
Anyway, it's pretty obvious which one is which one
Reddit is going to poison LLMs sooner than I thought.
LMAO while AIs reading training data sets get stuck in infinite loops.
It's account farming. They make fake accounts look legitimate so they can use them to influence opinions on the site.
Basically replaying a thread to make it look like there's activity in the sub.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory
I didn’t believe this when I first heard about it but it’s looking more true everyday
Yeah, even if we're not quite "there" yet, it feels like we're at least moving in that direction
I have a more realistic description of "Dead Internet Theory" that involves no conspiracy theories:
The Internet is becoming a monoculture, which is killing the vibrant, diverse, resilient, innovative space it used to be. Manifestos about a better way of life, and creative personal websites have been replaced with vapid social status posts in bland bootstrap layouts that double as data collection schemes. Technology that empowers people has been replaced with technology to restrict people. Bots masquerading as people is just the cherry on the sundae, the inevitable outcome of having created such a monoculture, a place where large orchards of content are so easy to pollute. The modern Internet ducking sucks, it has been ruined by people.
I remember when the narwhal used to bacon only at midnight.
Now the narwhal is forced to bacon continuously.
This kills the narwhal.
They lost so many users they needed the "engagement" numbers for the IPO so they opened the flood gate. Now they are stuck with an issue they can't fix without admitting the fraud.
Never trust a default username
[adjective] [noun] [3-4 digits] is always a sign of bad news, on social media and Xbox Live
Reposts has always been a major issue on reddit, there are an infamous moderator who would delete posts with traction and repost it himself for karma.
Using bots to duplicate comments on reposts is a new low though.
We use manual approval for programming.dev accounts where there is a very simple instruction you must follow to be approved. The amount of spam that fails that test makes me concerned about the amount of bots from instances without any barriers for account creation.
What happens on reddit (in regards to spam) will inevitably finds its way to ActivityPub link aggregators like lemmy.
I am sad that the current generation of federated social media/networks still doesn't have much, if any, implementation of web of trust functionality. I believe that's the only solution to bots/AI/etc content in the future. Show me content from people/accounts/profiles I trust, and accounts they trust, etc. When I see spam or scams or other misbehavior, show me the trust chain connecting me to it so I can sever it at the appropriate level instead of having to block individual accounts. (e.g. "sorry mom, you've trusted too many political frauds, I'm going to stop trusting people you trust")
Honestly I already believe that this has happened.
My reason for thinking this is because of this:
The spike that happened on October 2023 after the initial spike that happened due to the Reddit protests seems unnatural to me.
Someone gave the explanation of the release of the mobile clients but even then I wouldn't think it would lead to a spike equivalent to the initial one since it would mostly just be people using an account they already had instead of creating a new one.
Like honestly if someone knows what event happened then that made so many new users join I'd appreciate it.
I didn't get into Lemmy until there was a mobile client available, Sync to be specific. I believe it since a lot of Reddit users were basically mobile only. So, for a few months I basically subsisted on YouTube alone.
That's been happening for ages. I'm sure if you check the profiles you'll find other posts with all the same bots commenting. A lot of lazier ones wait exactly a year to repost, and it's pretty obvious in subs for something like a live service game where they'll be reposting complaints that are way out of date. One in the Monster Hunter sub reposted a trailer for Iceborne which had been out for 3 years by that point.
I'm mildly annoyed the recent thread is on the left not the right, but this is super interesting so thanks for sharing! 🤖
shit like this was happening before the exodus, you'd go into one thread then the other where it's crossposted, and it's the same comment, but with some dot, commas in weird places and it's a reply to another comment and doesn't really makes sense.
oh and youtube comments are full of nonsensical AI convos that like recommend financial advisors, or coins to invest in, like bruh
Give them some credit. They've finally changed the user name generator to random words instead of Adjective_Noun_####.
They have not, left is the more recent post. The right one could be real and is just recreated by these bots.
Just paid a visit. It’s really gotten bad. Horrible titles that make little sense. People falling over each other to make tired quips instead of conversation, and the rest to point out how someone is wrong or one-up the commenter.
I've noticed that many Reddit users with the username format Word_Word_Number (for example Absolute_Bot_1230) are almost guaranteed to either be a bot or extremely inflammatory -- it's like everything they post is meant to generate controversies.
Just said on a Reddit r/worldnews' thread that the subreddit has been astroturfed for years, as a response to someone wondering how could people in the comments be wishing for more innocent Palestinians be killed, and surprise surprise, I got instabanned. The site is becoming a façade of a fake reality in far more ways than one.
r/FluentinFinance is just five different accounts made less than a year ago that reposting the same political twitter screenshots with the exact same titles that all get boosted to the front page every time. Idk if everyone there is too caught up in arguing the same points they made a week ago to notice or if everyone who eventually finds out gets banned.
A strange thing on reddit is that if you make a new account and then make a comment that gets like 8 down votes then that new account gets shadow banned.
They've implemented so many rules that it encourages new users to act in the same way as the hive mind. Where even if you are an actual user then you are indistinguishable from a bot. Basically you've become a living NPC.
Would be even hard to detect now that AI can write the same message in different ways. I question every comment I read, especially the ones appealing to one’s emotions.
Not just Reddit every website I go to now I see this. Even on official game forums like World of Warcraft. Using to promote content or advertise in a way that tries to be organic.
My favorite are the YouTube comments saying to follow Jesus or whatever regardless of the actual content of the video. Who is that even for? LOL
Thank god this isn't a problem here
P░ U░S░S░ Y░I░ N░B░I░O ░
It's a good thing Lemmy isn't popular enough to have bots and propagandists posting here with less moderation than Reddit...
...Right?
The internet is full of bots, Reddit is no exception. Believe it or not, neither is Lemmy.
Lemmy is not immune to this!! We need to develop FOSS to mitigate/detect that
I feel really bad for this person.
Ah, I remember the reddit hug of death, from back when ordinary websites existed and got visitors, instead of just the same 25 mega corp sites that get linked now.
Another settlement needs our help. I'll mark it on your map.
IMO the only way to not be infected by bot content is to not be popular, or small enough to be irrelevant.
Nobody uses reddit. The exodus did more damage than people thought. This doesn't surprise me.
I mean a lot of us still use reddit, you can just ignore the main site and focus on your niche communities
Yeah, I've seen that a bunch of times. Some subredits seem to be a particularly popular places to karma-farm to make convincing sock-puppet accounts to sell. Often someone in the thread points out that it is a bot repost - but the fake post and fake comments are easier to engage with compared to the accusation that someone is a karma-farming bot.
(And of course, these bots-in-training will upvote each other's comments and posts... so it always looks pretty popular.)