Will Manidis is the CEO of AI-driven healthcare startup ScienceIO
To be fair it was bots that voted them to the front page.
Anyone who did any kind of modding on Reddit could see the majority of posts and comments where mostly bots.
Bots competitions for upvotes/views and clicks.
Reddit’s been like that since ~2018
Does Lemmy have any features that resist this kind of astroturfing?
No one would consider bots talking to one another a real conversation, but is there anything regular users can do?
This is the whole reason that I discovered and came to Lemmy. Reddit is literally 90% bots, from the posts, to the filtering, to the censoring, to outright banning. It’s a mess.
Or getting this shit after you comment somewhere:
“Excuse me but could you please send a direct message to our admins to verify your account before placing a comment? Everyone has to do it.”
I replied “go fuck yourself” and they banned me instantly and I never even submitted anything lmao.
Tbh, I see how this can be really good for people. We can never again believe that what apples are saying online is really representative of the general population. It never has been, but now we have a really solid reason to dispel the belief that doesn’t require much explanation.
That said, we’ll need to combat this with more right knit communities where people can better identify themselves as human. Captcha doesn’t do that, but the Goth girls on VF so long ago had it figured out. We gotta do proper “salutes”.
