Why isn’t lemmy taken over with bots yet? Is it just a matter of time?
There’s currently (*comparatively) no money to be made with bots given Lemmy’s comparatively small size, I’d wager. Bots on Reddit are used to advertise and to push companies’ agendas. Lemmy’s too small for that
There is definitely money to be made. Whether it is shilling for a product or even attempting to inflate market share in the hopes of converting said market share into either donations or outright selling to investors.
Yeah, I don’t think they have figured out how to properly manipulate lemmy yet (I have seen a shocking amount of facebook “why don’t these kinds of posts go viral” levels of nonsense, for example). But bots are cheap and to pretend that there is not an active effort to figure out how to manipulate us is naivety, at best.
Maybe it is just that I am an old. I watched reddit fall. Hell, I watched fucking gamefaqs “fall”. Not to mention usenet and the rest. Because the reality is that where there are people, there is money. And modern day advertisement techniques (whether it is AI bots or just people in a warehouse in the global south) are increasingly cheap.
If Lemmy had the numbers Reddit does, we’d have more bots. I expect our admins are more responsive and more willing to take risks (like banning legit users when they’re a false positive for a bot). But the APIs available also make bots easier.
The longer term solution is probably a paid instance and/or identify verification. A one-time fee of $5-15 would significantly hinder bots and help the fediverse to be sustainable. It means bans stick much better, and slows cheap bots from having infinite attempts to achieve indistinguishably.
Identity verification comes with its own problems, but they may be workable. People don’t want to post under their real names, but that information doesn’t need to be revealed. It could be possible to have regional instances that verify and publish only your general location, such as state or county.
We have a bot problem, but we also have admins/ mods that don’t want to bloat their numbers with bots (mostly). The fediverse helps us hold each other accountable, and if any community is full of bots, you defedirate them. I don’t mind the auto posters that seed content. I like the OSRS update bot, etc…
My guess is we’re still too small and niche to be a tempting target.
I think the federated nature of lemmy will make it an easy target when it does come along though.
Disclaimer: I don’t really know what I’m talking about.
Edit: Spelling
There are bots and astroturfers on Lemmy now to be clear, just not nearly to the point of the disaster that is R-town. That said, it’s not nearly as bad. The point i wanted to make is that federation is the one thing protecting Lemmy from corporate bot/shill takeover. The way Lemmy will be reddit’d/digg’d would be if centralization of servers became high enough that corpo corrupted ones become the defacto servers, who’d cut federation with the smaller privately-owned instances we currently enjoy.
Just got a random message from a new account I suspect of being a bot or scammer.
But lemmy is still small enough, and has mods/admins that are less jaded and defeated than the bigger platforms, that there is a bigger pushback on the scams.
Every site has a critical mass at which scammers will be more motivated than the moderators. Reddit got too big, then shit all over the experienced mods. Double whammy.
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