RememberTheApollo_ ,

Just paid a visit. It’s really gotten bad. Horrible titles that make little sense. People falling over each other to make tired quips instead of conversation, and the rest to point out how someone is wrong or one-up the commenter.

jkrtn ,

That's what it has been like for years now.

RememberTheApollo_ ,

IMO it’s gotten markedly worse since the 3rd party app debacle. Perhaps combined with the advent of AI added to bots has made it obvious. Yeah, it’s been on a decline for quite a bit with the repost bots repeating everything from posts to replies, but people would call them out. Now it’s like it’s bots all the way down or the remaining participants have resigned themselves to the decline.

Small subs still seem mostly safe, but anything with decent participation is pretty bad.

CafecitoHippo ,

Yeah the only real reason for Reddit for me anymore is sports discourse. E.g. the Baltimore Orioles are my MLB team. /r/Orioles on reddit has almost 80k members. Currently on the page there's 62 people actively in the sub and that's at 10am on a Wednesday, not during a game. The two Orioles communities on lemmy are [email protected] and Baltimore [email protected] and they have 133 and 131 subscribers, respectively. There's a bot posting game day threads and 0 comments in all of them. The only post not by a game day bot was 21 days ago.

Rivers ,
@Rivers@lemmy.world avatar

Reddit went to shit when the zoomers flooded in, arguably the late 90’s kids aswell

Pacrat173 ,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory

I didn’t believe this when I first heard about it but it’s looking more true everyday

DahGangalang ,

Yeah, even if we're not quite "there" yet, it feels like we're at least moving in that direction

Anti_Face_Weapon ,

My understanding of how this works is that that left one is real accounts making real comments, at least in the majority.

Then when the link gets reposted, either by a bot or naturally, potentially depending on the title, the bots scrape the old comments and post them.

It's content farming. And Reddit is probably okay with this.

livus ,

Reddit is going to poison LLMs sooner than I thought.

bjorney ,

Reddit probably omits bot accounts when it sells its data to AI companies

phdepressed ,

I doubt Reddit is in charge of many of the existing bots on their site.

bjorney ,

Reddit has access to its own data - they absolutely know which users are posting unique content and which user's content is a 100% copy of data that exists elsewhere on their own platform

phdepressed ,

I know they could be I'm just not sure they're that competent. These bots often aren't single user or just copy paste either, there's usually some effort to mix it up or change wording slightly. Reddits internal search function is infamously shit but they "know" which users are unlabeled bots with some effort put behind them?

bjorney ,

I know everyone here likes to circle jerk over "le Reddit so incompetent" but at the end of the day they are a (multi) billion dollar company and it's willfully ignorant to infer that there isn't a single engineer at the company who knows how to measure string similarity between two comment trees (hint: import difflib in python)

icydefiance ,
  1. To compare every comment on reddit to every other comment in reddit's entire history would require an index, and if you want to find similar comments instead of exact matches, it becomes a lot harder to do that efficiently. ElasticSearch might be able to do it, but then you need to duplicate all of that data in a separate database and keep it in sync with your main database without affecting performance too much when people are leaving new comments, and that would probably be expensive.
  2. Comparing combinations of comments is probably impossible. Reddit has a massive number of comments to begin with, and the number of possible subtrees of those comments would just be absurd. If you only care about comparing entire threads and not subtrees, then this doesn't apply, but I don't know how useful that will be.
  3. Programmers just do what they're told. If the managers don't care about something, the programmers won't work on it.
livus ,

Doubt it, they are interwoven into almost any conversation with more than 70 comments.

postmateDumbass ,

LMAO while AIs reading training data sets get stuck in infinite loops.

moriquende ,

The right one is the "real" accounts. Notice how the left one is newer and all the accounts have names ending with four digits, except where they aren't copies from the right.

Sternout ,

No, the left one is older and most the names in the right contain four numbers.

What's going on here?

Maybe op updated the picture?

Blaze ,
@Blaze@reddthat.com avatar

I did, because other people complained in another comment that it was confusing to not have the older thread on the left.

Anyway, it's pretty obvious which one is which one

Sternout ,

Thanks
I almost thought I'm delusional

FiniteBanjo ,

I also thought you were, lmao.

runswithjedi ,

It looks like the right are real accounts and left are bots. Your explanation sounds plausible, though.

Anti_Face_Weapon ,

The left predates the right by 10 months

runswithjedi ,

OP updated the image. You're correct, the left side is now the older one. So some of the comments in this thread will need to be reversed, but not all of them. Not confusing at all! 🤪

Damage ,

It's account farming. They make fake accounts look legitimate so they can use them to influence opinions on the site.

Turious ,

Been happening a lot longer than you imagine. I stopped using Reddit when the third party apps got shut down. At least the last year of my time there was calling out repost bot accounts. Threads like that on smaller subs with week moderation were really common.

Even on some better moderated subs, they got through.

Reddit died for me a long time ago.

Bonehead ,

Give them some credit. They've finally changed the user name generator to random words instead of Adjective_Noun_####.

solstice ,

This is extremely dangerous to our democracy.

brax ,

What if find absolutely wild is how their stock didn't just flop. The site has been on a downward spiral since the first redesign, and with the cut to API they've basically entered a freefall. I could seen people backing Reddit like 14 years ago, but now? Why?

I suppose if there's any optimism to have in OP's post it's that the bots are at least propagating messaging that's better for the greater good than the typical shit that's trying to get us into a full dystopia.

ArtVandelay ,
@ArtVandelay@lemmy.world avatar

This is extremely dangerous to our democracy.

KillingTimeItself ,

This is extremely dangerous to our democracy.

DestroyMegacorps ,

This is extremely dangerous to our democracy.

RobinRoswell ,

This is extremely dangerous to our democracy.

Resol ,
@Resol@lemmy.world avatar

This is extremely dangerous to our democracy.

egeres ,
@egeres@lemmy.world avatar

Lemmy is not immune to this!! We need to develop FOSS to mitigate/detect that

KillingTimeItself ,

oh it's simple, don't capitalize and it's immediately harder to do.

Chozo ,
@Chozo@fedia.io avatar

I do find it funny that you didn't capitalize any words in this comment.

KillingTimeItself ,

i mean listen we've got priorities here. We're capitalizing, not capitalizing.

DanTDM ,

Thank god this isn't a problem here

P░ U░S░S░ Y░I░ N░B░I░O ░

PrettyFlyForAFatGuy ,

hey...

There's no pussy in your bio...

😡

p03locke ,
@p03locke@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

Just keep clicking. You'll get to the malware eventually.

MargotRobbie ,
@MargotRobbie@lemmy.world avatar

Reposts has always been a major issue on reddit, there are an infamous moderator who would delete posts with traction and repost it himself for karma.

Using bots to duplicate comments on reposts is a new low though.

v4ld1z ,
@v4ld1z@lemmy.zip avatar

Esteemed, world-renowned actress Margot Robbie?!

milicent_bystandr ,

Is it new? I got the impression that's also been going on a while.

MargotRobbie ,
@MargotRobbie@lemmy.world avatar

It's definitely not a new issue, but it's only gotten worse since reddit has gone more and more mainstream.

If you follow me on Lemmy since last year, you should know that I've always been extremely against having bots posting here.

blanketswithsmallpox ,

It's a good thing Lemmy isn't popular enough to have bots and propagandists posting here with less moderation than Reddit...

...Right?

FlyingSquid ,
@FlyingSquid@lemmy.world avatar

I don't think there's a single bot on LemSTACK OVERFLOW ERROR PLEASE RESTART APPLICATION TO CONTINUE.

UndercoverUlrikHD ,

We use manual approval for programming.dev accounts where there is a very simple instruction you must follow to be approved. The amount of spam that fails that test makes me concerned about the amount of bots from instances without any barriers for account creation.

What happens on reddit (in regards to spam) will inevitably finds its way to ActivityPub link aggregators like lemmy.

sparr ,

I am sad that the current generation of federated social media/networks still doesn't have much, if any, implementation of web of trust functionality. I believe that's the only solution to bots/AI/etc content in the future. Show me content from people/accounts/profiles I trust, and accounts they trust, etc. When I see spam or scams or other misbehavior, show me the trust chain connecting me to it so I can sever it at the appropriate level instead of having to block individual accounts. (e.g. "sorry mom, you've trusted too many political frauds, I'm going to stop trusting people you trust")

takeda ,

I think this would be a great feature request: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues

I would definitively use it if it was implemented. Make it work like it is in GPG, where you can rank users based on your trust, and that is then propagated to others.

EldritchFeminity ,

This concept reminds me of a certain browser extension that marks trans allies and transphobic accounts/websites using a user aggregate with thresholds that mark transphobes as red and trans allies as green.

SorteKanin ,
@SorteKanin@feddit.dk avatar

I guess the question is how specifically you implement such a system, in this case for software like Lemmy. Should instances have a trust level with each other? Should you set a trust when you subscribe to a community? I'm not sure how you can make a solution that will be simple for users to use (and it needs to be simple for users, we can't only have tech people on Lemmy).

sparr ,

For the simplest users, my initial idea is just a binary "do you trust them?" for each person (aka "friends") and non-person (aka "follow"), and maybe one global binary of "do you trust who they trust?" that defaults to yes. anything more complex than that can be optional.

SorteKanin ,
@SorteKanin@feddit.dk avatar

But how does this work when you follow communities? Do you need to trust every single poster in a community?

sparr ,

You'd see posts in a community/group/etc based on your trust of the community, unless you've explicitly de-trusted the poster or you trust someone who de-trusts them (and you haven't broken that chain).

SorteKanin ,
@SorteKanin@feddit.dk avatar

Right, so if I have no connection to someone else, it'd be "neutral" and I'd see the post. If I trust them transitively, then it would be a trusted post and if I distrust them transitively, it would be a distrusted post.

I think implementing such a thing would not only be complicated but also quite computationally demanding - I mean you'd need to calculate all of this for every single user?

Danterious ,

Honestly I already believe that this has happened.

My reason for thinking this is because of this:

https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/pictrs/image/04be8c20-decd-49ad-80eb-91c5bdecf689.png

The spike that happened on October 2023 after the initial spike that happened due to the Reddit protests seems unnatural to me.

Someone gave the explanation of the release of the mobile clients but even then I wouldn't think it would lead to a spike equivalent to the initial one since it would mostly just be people using an account they already had instead of creating a new one.

Like honestly if someone knows what event happened then that made so many new users join I'd appreciate it.

STOMPYI ,

Newer user here... the api stuff got me to delete my reddit account but still surf it, it was the day of the IPO that i created my lemmy account...

Grandwolf319 ,

Is that just accounts in total or active accounts?

I didn’t comment much in the beginning.

Now I try to comment at least once a day.

Danterious ,

accounts in total.

Grandwolf319 ,

Wait, then how would it go down? Are people deleting their accounts that much?

Danterious ,

Apparently. But it seems like it only happened around the beginning after the second spike it stabilized for some reason.

Edit: Here is the page with the stats

Grandwolf319 ,

Okay then I will admit, it does seem fishy.

Reddfugee42 ,

I remember when the narwhal used to bacon only at midnight.

Now the narwhal is forced to bacon continuously.

This kills the narwhal.

thorbot ,

🤮

TigrisMorte ,

They lost so many users they needed the "engagement" numbers for the IPO so they opened the flood gate. Now they are stuck with an issue they can't fix without admitting the fraud.

orangeboats ,

I've noticed that many Reddit users with the username format Word_Word_Number (for example Absolute_Bot_1230) are almost guaranteed to either be a bot or extremely inflammatory -- it's like everything they post is meant to generate controversies.

meowMix2525 ,

Yeah reddit has a name generator that you can choose from when you create an account and that's the format it uses. Those names are almost exclusively bots and throwaway/anon accounts

abc ,
@abc@lemmus.org avatar

I don't get it. They already created a good bot network, but the username part is where they get lazy.

greencactus ,

Thank you. That is the day when I'll finally stop using Reddit. I never have thought that bots write that realistically, so thank you for proving it.

meowMix2525 ,

Well they actually don't write that realistically, these are copy and paste bots that are just trying to farm karma so they can later sell the account (which I've heard is a thing apparently?). You can see the left is all original accounts by the uniqueness of their usernames and the copied posts on the right are all reddit generated names.

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