I’ve run this experiment before. ~90% of accounts sampled on the top 20 /r/all with not prior post history before 2-3 months got converted to cryptocurrency spam bots. Some of the remainder were porn spam. A few deleted accounts. A few seemingly real people. This was during the heights of cryptocurrency mania. Believe me or don’t. I can’t be assed with source dropping internet-pseud wankery.
Bot deception tactics have certainly changed since the prevalence of LLMs. I haven’t been paying attention to what the patterns have shifted to. Before these times, it was easily spotted because they were relatively simple.
I believe earlier this year someone on /r/theoryofreddit spotted closed networks of subreddits where bots engage with each other. Those are used to farm accounts on a massive scale.
OctopusNemeses@lemmy.world 3 days ago
I’ve run this experiment before. ~90% of accounts sampled on the top 20 /r/all with not prior post history before 2-3 months got converted to cryptocurrency spam bots. Some of the remainder were porn spam. A few deleted accounts. A few seemingly real people. This was during the heights of cryptocurrency mania. Believe me or don’t. I can’t be assed with source dropping internet-pseud wankery.
Bot deception tactics have certainly changed since the prevalence of LLMs. I haven’t been paying attention to what the patterns have shifted to. Before these times, it was easily spotted because they were relatively simple.
I believe earlier this year someone on /r/theoryofreddit spotted closed networks of subreddits where bots engage with each other. Those are used to farm accounts on a massive scale.
Nonconfrontational@lemmy.ml 2 days ago
I’m talking about lemmy.