Social media platforms like Twitter and Reddit are increasingly infested with bots and fake accounts, leading to significant manipulation of public discourse. These bots don't just annoy users—they skew visibility through vote manipulation. Fake accounts and automated scripts systematically downvote posts opposing certain viewpoints, distorting the content that surfaces and amplifying specific agendas.
Before coming to Lemmy, I was systematically downvoted by bots on Reddit for completely normal comments that were relatively neutral and not controversial at all. Seemed to be no pattern in it... One time I commented that my favorite game was WoW, down voted -15 for no apparent reason.
For example, a bot on Twitter using an API call to GPT-4o ran out of funding and started posting their prompts and system information publicly.
https://www.dailydot.com/debug/chatgpt-bot-x-russian-campaign-meme/
Bots like these are probably in the tens or hundreds of thousands. They did a huge ban wave of bots on Reddit, and some major top level subreddits were quiet for days because of it. Unbelievable...
How do we even fix this issue or prevent it from affecting Lemmy??
Add a requirement that every comment must perform a small CPU-costly proof-of-work. It's a negligible impact for an individual user, but a significant impact for a hosted bot creating a lot of comments.
Even better if you make the PoW performing some bitcoin hashes, because it can then benefit the Lemmy instance owner which can offset server costs.
Will that ruin my phone's battery?
Also what if I'm someone poor using an extremely basic smartphone to connect to the internet?
Only if you're commenting as much as a bot, probably wouldn't be any more power usage than opening up a poorly optimized website tbh
rip
rip
it would only be generated the first time, and possible rerolls down the line.
just wait, it's a little rough, but it's worth it. 10 hours overnight would be reasonable. Even longer is more so if you limit CPU usage. The idea is that creating one account takes like 10 minutes, but creating 1000 would simply take too much CPU time in order to be worth the time.