• JustAnotherKay@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Using this low of a contrast (dark red on dark background) is criminal. Maybe my eyes are just that bad but good lord those notes are hard to read

  • Soup@lemmy.cafe
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    1 year ago

    News flash: it’s not just ask Reddit. It’s Reddit entirely. That place is a removed of bots.

  • DarkKnight_@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    A lot of the site feels like it’s been overrun by bots. The more niche communities seem to still be pretty good (and I do still enjoy engaging in them). But the subs like ask Reddit, Aita and the relationships one? Yea, it all feels like bs.

    • sillyplasm@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      If only the niche communities over here were a bit more active. For instance, I’ve been hyperfixating on Tamagotchi, but there isn’t a Tamagotchi community here yet :(

    • Xanthrax@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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…

  • Wilzax@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    If reddit hadn’t locked their API behind absurd paywalls, it would have been a cool project to try to make a browser plugin that gives accounts a “credit score” based on the factors you’ve been looking at, in order to let users quickly judge how likely an account is a bot.

    It could let people adjust the metrics it uses to calculate that score in the settings, so even if it becomes popular enough for bots to start trying to game the system, people can adapt their scoring metrics themselves and share config profiles that they think are more effective at rating bots.

    Might be something cool to see for activitypub/fediverse/lemmy accounts, but with the data available varying by instance it might be a little harder to calibrate a “catch-all” scoring config

  • merthyr1831@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    the average redditor will still insist on appending “Reddit” onto Google searches since it “lets them see real human opinions” only because they can’t discern obvious botting from genuine human interactions

    • bitwaba@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      A lot of the botting is just copy and pasting previous actual human topics and comments though, so they’re not really wrong.

      Actual bot created content is pretty boring, and never “contributes” in a way that would make for a useful Google result. Your Google result may be a bot’s comment, but if that comment is answering a question of some kind there’s a 99% chance the comment was originally written by a human.

      • Morshveeneck@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        The content of bots (the desired ones) is at least not banned or removed by anyone. For example, I feel socially excluded by the Reddit and para-Reddit communities because whenever I write something a bit more controversial, it immediately ends up in the trash.

      • merthyr1831@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        copying and pasting a comment is still less genuine, since that promotes stale and outdated information. It can also create the false idea of a “widely held” opinion rather than a single person’s opinion copied a dozen times.

    • seaQueue@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      They’re engagement fodder designed to elicit human responses to provide a larger training dataset for future LLMs. That and to drive up Reddit usage and engagement numbers.

  • OsrsNeedsF2P@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    Two questions:

    1. How can you be sure they’re bots?
    2. Assuming you can be sure (which I entirely doubt), how do you detect and ban them in a way they can’t come back?
    • Draconic NEO@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago
      1. There are patterns of bot-posters, as well as the fact that in many cases the content exists elsewhere online and was copied.
      2. You can’t really. While you can ban individual accounts, they are able to make more, as I’ve said before it’s very easy to evade bans in ways that prevent easy ban evasion detection on Reddit’s part. It’s also likely that if Reddit is doing it they won’t enforce ban evasion against bots, though I find that option less likely.
      • MeatsOfRage@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        This for sure. It’s something severely lacking at Lemmy, without the large user base the small communities can’t sustain the way they do on Reddit. Lemmy serves best as a replacement for the biggest subs.

        • superkret@feddit.org
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          1 year ago

          I noticed I’m not even missing the small subs anymore.
          4 different meme subs about an obscure Romanian soap opera don’t improve my quality of life.

          • MeatsOfRage@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Memes no, but I’ve found a lot of value in things like my hometown has a pretty active sub on Reddit which is useful for local information or subs around specific TV shows or video games bring a lot of interesting discussion or just asking questions on niche topics I’m much more likely to get an answer from a larger user base.

            • manuallybreathing@lemmy.ml
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              1 year ago

              My home town subreddit has seen at least 1 news years eve orgy organised through it, havent seen anything comparable on lemmy!

          • Revan343@lemmy.ca
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            1 year ago

            Hobby subs are the big one. If your hobby is anything other than dicking around with Linux, we probably don’t have much of a community for it, if we have one at all.

            • CandleTiger@programming.dev
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              1 year ago

              Truth. RVs and sailboats are not here. But I feel confident I’d get all the discussion I need if I wanted to install Linux on my sailboat.

              • Revan343@lemmy.ca
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                1 year ago

                Have you considered a Framework sailboat? They’re a little more expensive, but they’re designed with repairability in mind, and come with Linux pre-installed

                • Oha@lemmy.ohaa.xyz
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                  1 year ago

                  Framework sailboats are overpriced garbage!!
                  You would be better off with a thinkboat x61s

          • KingJalopy @lemm.ee
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            1 year ago

            In all honesty the lack of super specific and active communities on lemmy has actually improved my quality of life. I spend much, much less time scrolling and reading shit.

            • AFK BRB Chocolate@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              It’s a valid point, but it’s kind of like saying it’s great that the restaurant you’ve started going to has such a small menu compared to the old one because you’re not eating as much.

      • trailee@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        The user volume to support niche communities is the most obvious thing missing in Lemmy. But I have a darker view of the future. Picture LLM bots forging organic-looking conversations that result in a product recommendation. It looks like a genuine human conversation, but it’s actually an advertisement. Maybe it’s mixed with some human comments, but that may only add to the realism of the fraud.

        That kind of ”advertising“ could potentially command a lot of money. And it could probably eventually infect just about any text platform. Maybe Lemmy as well someday?

        You could deploy it pretty effectively in sufficiently large niche communities.

      • NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip
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        1 year ago

        People go there because they don’t care about interacting with other human beings. They just want an echo chamber and to occasionally feel like they are an Influencer.

        And you can see the same at lemmy. Someone posts something someone doesn’t like? Immediate downvote (and, for the more pathetic people, downvoting on a few alts as well) with no comment or even attempt to refute things other than MAYBE an ad hominem. And plenty of “What is your favorite X” spam-engagement posts that just involve repeating whatever marketing schpiel they heard in the past.

        There has been a recent tendency for people to reference social media network sites that are nothing but bots and… it is increasingly obvious that that is what most people want. They want to feel like they are the tastemakers. They want to be moistcritical without needing to focus test the most normy of center-right takes.

        • snooggums@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Someone posts something someone doesn’t like? Immediate downvote

          Well, yeah. That is what the button is for.

            • superkret@feddit.org
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              1 year ago

              It’s supposed to be for whatever the fuck you want to use it for. There’s no downvote police on lemmy.
              Personally, I upvote every reply I get and nothing else.

            • snooggums@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              I downvote comments that promote hateful ideologies, whether or no they were posted in bad faith. I also downvote posts that derail the conversation, whether or not I think they were posted in bad faith because it is impossible to know if someone is posting in good faith from an individual post. By the time a pattern is clear the thread is derailed.

              Context also matters, because the same post about grilled mushrooms as a substitute for grilled steaks will be posted in good faith to different posts and be a net positive or negative depending on the post. A post about grilling in general? Positive, because it adds to the topic! A post about the best cut of beef for grilling? Negative, because it derails the thread to be about not eating beef.

              Sure, people should not be downvoting non-important topics or views that they could just block instead. But a lot of people also assume bad faith when someone disagrees with them, so that isn’t good criteria either.