• FiniteBanjo@lemmy.today
        1·
        11 months ago

        Definitely depends on where you’re going. Certain Hexbear posts are such obvious bot networks, while some niche communities can remember what they wrote more than two comments ago.

    • fine_sandy_bottom@discuss.tchncs.de
      1·
      11 months ago

      This gets posted all the time, and it’s frustrating that it lacks any nuance.

      It’s just a spooky bedtime story… “imagine if everyone you talk to online is just a bot”

      Yes a lot of online content is generated.

      Yes it’s getting worse.

      Yes there’s lots of bots.

      However… you can choose where you spend your time online, and spend it with friends or likeminded people.

      What I mean to say is, some communities on reddit are “mostly dead”, but you don’t have to go there.

  • Anti-Face Weapon@lemmy.world
    1·
    11 months ago

    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.

    • Damage@feddit.it
      1·
      11 months ago

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

    • moriquende@lemmy.world
      0·
      11 months ago

      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.

        • EldritchFeminity@lemmy.blahaj.zone
          1·
          11 months ago

          I saw this exact same style of bot account years ago on Tumblr. They always follow the same naming scheme: one word or two words combined and then a string of 4 digits. I bet if you go to any of their profiles, you’ll find like 4 comments that are all copied from old threads and a bunch of upvotes on completely random subs, possibly even all of them being on other bot accounts’ posts and comments.

          The real question is whether they’re being used to fake activity on Reddit, sway public opinion by posting this sort of political slant, or will they later be used to advertise scams and this is just to make them seem legitimate.

  • Reddfugee42@lemmy.world
    1·
    11 months ago

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

    Now the narwhal is forced to bacon continuously.

    This kills the narwhal.

  • UndercoverUlrikHD@programming.dev
    0·
    11 months ago

    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.