I love how so many people on Reddit are acting like this is a complete shock. That site has been a cesspool of bots and targeted ads for years now, people still believed they were having real conversations with humans? I'd be surprised if legit content was higher than 50%.
It's so bad, basically every post there is pushed by bots. The entire purpose of reddit is to shape opinion by forced consensus.
It's a propaganda machine inside the bloated husk of a forum aggregator.
Lemmy isn't impervious but it's much better than reddit.
That’s just the consequence of being popular. Lemmy isn’t impervious or even resistant to this
And of insanely easy account creation. You didn't even need an email.
Reddit doesn't require email either.
I was talking about reddit. Lemmy, at least the instances i was on, needs manual approval
They can literally setup an instance themselves. By the time it is identified as such, the damage is basically done. Just make a new one. Or use one of the many instances not requiring approval. Or fill out the form with ai. They don't actually need an insane number of accounts for their subterfuge. Having just "some" and keeping them tied to conversational themes/topics seems sufficient?
I’d argue it is resistant. Lemmy is federated, which means smaller instances, making it easier to detect this kind of activity. Crime in a city vs crime in a town situation
Nah, it works for now because no one really tries to spam lemmy. If it gets popular enough companies will pay bot farms to post here and admins want be able to keep up with moderation. Bots will simply join the biggest instances. The only solution would be to defederate the main instances and have everyone pretty much host their own server.
look at Mastodon and it’s practically what’s happening there. bot farms don’t even bother setting up their own servers, they just go to mastodon.social (by far the largest instance) and bot from there. and because .social refuses to have manual approval for each account, and many instances don’t want to defenerate from where almost everyone is, the problem keeps happening…
And if everybody hosts their own server, than so will the advertisers and everybody will have to defederate then individually making the problem of moderation even worse.
When it gets bad enough the default will switch from blacklists to whitelists and the user base will consolidate to fewer and fewer popular instances that are able to address the spam.
Bots will simply join the biggest instances. The only solution would be to defederate the main instances and have everyone pretty much host their own server.
the user base will consolidate to fewer and fewer popular instances that are able to address the spam.
You spin me right round, baby, right round 🎶🎶
There's a way to look at the top Karma users on Reddit. Most of them are either bots, or corporate account. There's a Marvel one that posts movie stuff, and some Turbo something or other for gaming. They don't comment, they just post what their corporate overlords want you to see, and they probably have bots that push their content to the top. They just aggregate popular sites, though, driving people into the ads.
When I was on Reddit, going to that leaderboard to block people was my first stop. Though, I do think there are a few that are interesting, even bots — like the haiku one is amusing. It doesn't always get it right, but it's fun to see it try. Then there's a guy — pretty sure it's a person, at least — who turns posts into poems. Not quite the same. Got a weird name. Regular Redditors know who they are. "Something for your something", I think. I don't block the fun ones. Just the corporate trash.
Oh, Poem for your Sprog. I remember that one. Users like that are one of the few things I miss about Reddit.
Poem for your sprog
I've seen someone who took that username here in Lemmy, but that could be anyone, no guarantee that it was the same guy/gal on reddit
Poem for your sprog. I had no problem with the novelty accounts, and even the bot accounts there were clearly just some dev with a quirky sense of humor. Though those got hate from the anti bot purists, for whatever stupid reason.
It’s the corporate, vote manipulating, spam, Russian propaganda etc bots that piss me off. And those are much more subtle and harder to detect.
And the CEO. And the mods.
Sprog, that was it. Yeah. What's a sprog, anyway? It's not flagged as misspelled. Yeah, I don't like AIs that steal content, but funny jokes are fine. Novelty accounts are fine. There were a few people who claimed to be famous people. Maybe they were those people. I never cared. They weren't anything special to me. I just treated them like novelty accounts, same as anyone else really.
We have "Margot Robbie" and "Nicole!"
Cool, so- everyone should boycott those games and send a message to any developer hiring shitfucks like this clown and his company.
r/gaming is shit. Bunch of sycophants all soft criticizing games like a review magazine afraid of offending the makers while talking about their playthrough. Go figure. Heaven help you if you have an actual opinion outside of the box, or don’t know some bit of terminology or lore about a game that is “common knowledge”.
I was hated on Reddit for not hating the main character of Horizon Forbidden West. God forbid someone enjoys a woman speaking.
I never understood the hate for Aloy. She was at worst bland with a pretty heavy helping of "I'm better at everything because I'm the main character", but she's hardly alone in that, and it doesn't usually attract that much ire.
I really didn't understand the complaints that she was unattractive or even outright ugly.
She doesn't have massive tits and dresses like you'd expect someone surviving in a robot dinosaur apocalypse to dress. So, not porn/isn't sexy, therefore game bad.
It boggles my mind that people fucking care. It's not like porn isn't freely available on the Internet, and porn of those characters specifically isn't easy to find. But if you've seen some of the criticism coming from that crowd about Ghost of Yotei it'll make sense.
What's sad is Yotei has plenty of faults they could criticize instead. But they can't see past women as purely an object for sex so here we are.
Also Aloy was fucking hot.
Freckles AND a jawline? Unplayable.
That fits pretty much every game where you control a main character. MCs rarely have a suitable explanation for why they're so special beyond the rule of cool. Why can Gordon Freeman take out teams of special ops? Because he's the MC. He's a pretty bland character that doesn't say anything, but he's loved by millions.
Bunch of sycophants all soft criticizing games like a review magazine afraid of offending the makers while talking about their playthrough.
Almost as though its a heavily astroturfed community and many of the accounts are exactly this.
Heaven help you if you have an actual opinion outside of the box
That's just social media in a nutshell. You're either a loyal footsoldier or a radical insurgent. But you need to find your opposing faction and do battle with them. And then, if you get too confrontational, the Mods/Admins need to ban you for doing exactly what the site incentivizes.
Don't forget the lack of accountability among mods in reddit.
They can remove whatever they want, and we wouldn't even know it was there. This alone causes people to self-censor.
I was banned from r/gaming for daring to go against that grain, and as I understand that is typical. It was about a game I liked too , just wished they had taken a few risks. I think it was Breakpoint. I had some very harsh things to say about the Ubisoft formula and how much better that game could have been if they had embraced the sneaky techie gameplay instead of the looter shooter bullshit they'd done instead. What's funny to me is that shortly after release they updated the game to get rid of the looter shooter bullshit. So I clearly wasn't alone.
That sucks.
I left myself after being shouted down over criticizing a game for restricting player kits. The game was more fun without the restrictions, but fuck me for wanting more freedom in player classes.
This confirms what I expected. I thought I was going crazy the first time I saw an ask reddit repost and I recognized all the top answers. Eventually they bots will outnumber the users and dead Internet theory will prevail
There are definitely pockets of reddit that don't have their content flooded with bots, but they are the exception in today's day and age. I especially enjoy the college football subreddit, as there still isn't quite something similar on lemmy
A lot of the sports subs' better content is instant reaction. Harder to fake. The only participation I still have on reddit is a similar community for a large video game. It's more like a chatroom than a message board. Small wonder I spend way more time talking on Discord than anywhere these days.
Reddit be like
User A: i made this
Reddit: fuck off with the self marketing!
User B: my friend(definitely not me) quit their job and made this
Reddit: ohh my god this is brilliant!
The clear blend of cynicism and resignation in replies to the Reddit thread about the deleted Trap Plan post clearly illustrate how widely pervasive these practices are perceived to be.
I mean, back when professional game reviewing was more of a thing, game publishers used to do things like take said reviewers on outings and stuff to influence them, give them free copies, whatever. Marketers trying to subvert information flow isn't something that suddenly showed up with social media.
Oh no WHICH marketing company so I can't avoid them?
Edit: marketing firm is TRAP PLAN and the game that used is services was War Robots: Frontiers
Assume all of the big ones.
Theres been a lot of positive GTA6 posts across a bunch of the internet, like how they're "releasing it when theyre ready".
Which is funny because a few days ago, they fired 30+ people who tried to unionize.
Funniest was a comment I saw on reddit after the PR statement, saying looks like reddit overreacted and they are glad Rockstar set the record straight that the workers were fired for leaking information and not for anything related to unions. Typical redditors believing anything to get angry about.
It was over course downvoted, but the audacity of taking the position fully believing the PR release was hilarious that I wondered if it was a plant.
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