Just a few years ago, you would never see such a disparity in votes vs comments. But these days, this is pretty much the norm. I’ve seen posts with 10K+ upvotes and no more than 80 comments.
I’d say in about 2 years, the entire place is going to be bots with AI generated content that try to mimic “real users” using their new Dynamic Product Ads tool. Not sure how that’s legal as I thought ads needed to be marked or differentiated from regular content, but here we are.
The future looks bleak and AI even bleaker. Because it’s going to be used against us to make the rich richer and not to make our lives better.
We can still find engagement in small niche subs on Reddit. We’ve known, for many years, that people were going to move away from large corporate-controlled sites such as Reddit, Twitter etc…
The Fediverse is addressing this. It isn’t a panacea. However, it is a re-imagining of what we want the Internet to be.
There are many others, that will come along after us, to address this further.
What will stop bots from coming here? Registration filters and user reports?
Bots are already proliferating the fediverse. Kbin is constantly spammed with “buy online drugs here” links. Transparent bots (those that are tagged as bots) try to boost engagement by reposting things from Reddit, but are still perpetuating one of the worst aspects of reddit even if they’re being upfront about it. AI generated articles posted on obvious junk websites are constantly being spammed by the same accounts.
It’s a difficult problem to solve.
One thing I noticed the other day, while banning one such bot, is that the same network has been posting on Reddit as well.
Turns out the Reddit ones have been posting the spam for months, while the Lemmy ones get banned within hours.
Part of that is the lower volume of content here, but part of it is also the great people that take the time to report bad content ♥️
Kbin is constantly spammed with “buy online drugs here” links.
Got examples? I’ve never seen this once as a Kbin user.
There will always be bots on the Internet. I do not believe this is a solvable problem. Instead, we focus on mitigation.
However, Reddit has little incentive to fight the bots because it increases engagement metrics. In fact, it costs money and reduces profits to reduce bot activity. Hence, so many bots.
Right here on Lemmy, because nobody financially benefits from turning a blind eye to the problem, I think we have a head start. This platform is created by users for users. For that reason, I think we should never have the problem quite to the same extent as they do.
