Comment on The level of engagement on Reddit these days

• ringwraithfish@startrek.website ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago

  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 rest 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.

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  • otter@lemmy.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago

    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 ♥️

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    • ringwraithfish@startrek.website ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago

      I always report. However, I heard that the report only goes to the admin of your instance. Maybe future releases will support cross instance reporting and the ability for admins to “trust” bans by admins from other instances.

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      • otter@lemmy.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago

        I’m fuzzy on the details, but I do get reports from users on another instance as long as it’s “relevant” (ex. in one of our communities, one of our users)

        Banning a foreign user on our instance will fix the problem for our instance, but they need to be banned on the home instance too in order to stop the spam from continuing

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  • Dymonika@beehaw.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago

    Kbin is constantly spammed with “buy online drugs here” links.

    Got examples? I’ve never seen this once as a Kbin user.

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    • Blaze@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago

      They come up every few weeks, usually admins ban them quickly

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    • ringwraithfish@startrek.website ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago

      Here’s one: kbin.social/m/random/t/1060795 I always see them popping up under random@kbin.social

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      • exscape@kbin.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago

        Yeah, I see a ton of this under random.
        Here's my front page at this very moment: https://i.imgur.com/4IsJ68f.png

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  • rwhitisissle@beehaw.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago

    I would imagine IP bans would be useful. Although the issue with this is that you run into the problem other websites are having: people who are valid users that are on VPNs get caught in the filter of IP bans because botnets also use the same VPNs.

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• henfredemars@infosec.pub ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago

  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.

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  • drwho@beehaw.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago

    There are spambots that still post on Usenet newsgroups even after organics abandoned them twenty years ago.

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• B0rax@feddit.de ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago

  Yes, if it grows large enough, the bots will come.

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