Comment on Is Lemmy an effective alternative to Reddit?
GhiLA@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
Yeah, but no, but yeah.
On Lemmy, individual communities aren’t big enough to be communities but the community is big enough to be a community.
So any post that makes it to the front of the entire Fediverse has quite a few familiar faces and feels like old reddit would.
The issue I find with wanting Lemmy to be as big as Reddit is, you’re pining for an era of Reddit that doesn’t exist anymore. You can’t go back to 2011-2020 Reddit. It isn’t there to go back to. Bot posts aren’t just indistinguishable on occasion, they’re upvoted all the same, by other bots.
This is the best you’ve got. Pitch a tent and make the most of it, fam.
douglasg14b@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Unfortunately the bot problem is coming to Lemmy.
Bots posting content is already a thing here, and then taking up front page space is already a thing.
Lemmy is speed running “How to lose your sense of community”.
wise_pancake@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
I don’t agree, the longer I’ve been here the more familiar usernames I see, so to me it’s been improving.
Blaze@sopuli.xyz 2 months ago
Do you have examples of such bots?
EddoWagt@feddit.nl 2 months ago
Reddit repost bots I guess
LemUrun@pawb.social 2 months ago
Lemmy is developing. Lemmy will be a second Reddit. It will be…
douglasg14b@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Yes, and with reddit having a baseline corporate & bot astroturfing rate of ~25% that’s not exactly a good bar to measure by.
OpenStars@discuss.online 1 month ago
I disagree somewhat bc of one very crucial factor: here bots exist but they tend to be labelled as such. Look in your settings on the web UI if you find this not to be the case.
You click on a user account, then click block them, repeat just a handful of times and then bam, pretty much you have blocked all the bots there are. Yes it takes effort - it’s not done by default - but at least it’s possible, whereas on Reddit there is simply nothing that can be done, with virtually any amount of effort. Over there they are baked right into the system… right?
And here the bots are, or even can be, helpful. A bot that you know is a bot is a good bot, or at least an honest one.:-)
douglasg14b@lemmy.world 1 month ago
I… That’s not how this works. Or at least you don’t understand the context of this thread.
I can make an account (or 1000, Lemmy doesn’t exactly have controls to stop me) and run it as a bot, and NOT mark it as a bot. And use it to automatically manipulate the tone of conversations and threads without anyone knowing. And the premise of your argument is now void.
Labeling of bots is done via goodwill.
We’re not worried about goodwill users in this context. We’re talking about astroturfing bots posing as actual users.
OpenStars@discuss.online 1 month ago
Oh… then yes, ofc.
But if we can’t stop it, then so be it. Nothing is perfect, but you try anyway.
Wikipedia has some nice ideas about trusting people incrementally to increasing degrees depending on the outcome of previous manually curated efforts. And PieFed is bringing some of those thoughts into the Fediverse: join.piefed.social/…/piefed-features-for-growing-….
But part of it is not merely bots vs. humans, and rather different styles of what human psychology tends to gravitate toward: medium.com/…/the-cargo-cult-of-the-ennui-engine-8…. e.g. people saying things like “^This”, “I also choose this guy’s wife”, “And my bow”, etc.
Lonely people just wanting to be heard… but unless emoji reactions are provided, how else other than to write a comment? And/or upvote an existing one that says what you wanted. Therefore… “^This” it is then indeed, none of us are immune to such, and any system that relies on people never falling into that trap is going to be vulnerable. The same way that news organization in the West were vulnerable to being bought out by the wealthy - it was always going to happen.
Anyway, wishing for something doesn’t make it happen - that requires effort, like the PieFed approach, imperfect as it may be.