While browsing the fediverse I come across more and more accounts that seem … a bit off, a little uncanny. The stuff they post seems random, their comments slightly weird. What’s going on, is the fediverse being overrun by bots? Or am I as a fanatic anti-AI person just losing my mind and seeing the enemy everywhere?
I hate the fact that I now question every interaction that seems a bit off - it seems such a stupid waste of my time and I’m afraid I might just end up blocking real people who happen to express themselves in a strange way - as a neurodivergent person I know how bad I would feel about being ostracized as ‘too strange to be real’. How would you handle this?
Personally, I subscribe to “Live Internet Theory.” I assume that the vast majority of people I interact with are real people, and bots are very much an exception, and often easy to identify.
The Internet connects people with different views who wouldn’t otherwise meet and who might not express their opinions if they did. Most of the time when I see people lob accusations of being a bot at someone, it’s either because their worldview is too limited to imagine a person thinking differently from them, or they just want to use the accusation as an excuse to write them off. The reality is, I think most people who post like expressing themselves through posts, and rather than go through a bot and posting that, they just wouldn’t post.
Maybe I err too much on the side of assuming people are human, but I’d rather do that than assume a human is a bot. Especially because I find the biggest “Dead Internet Theory” types tend to be insufferably unimaginative and close-minded, and I don’t want to be like them.
welcome to the beginning of the dead internet. i wonder if it will outlive humanity, bots tweeting at eachother and posting nonsense generated cat food recipes for nobody
Like that 1969 Ray Bradbury story, “Night Call, Collect”, where a man stranded on Mars spends 60 years setting up pre-recorded messages for himself that one day spring into action and eventually start talking to each other.
Spoiler
A relay snapped somewhere. The two phone voices were connected, one to the other.
“Hello, Barton?”
“Yes, Barton?”
“Aged twenty-four.”
“I’m twenty-six. We’re both young. What’s happened?”
“I don’t know. Listen.”
The silent room. The old man did not stir on the floor. The wind blew in the broken window. The air was cool.
“Congratulate me, Barton, this is my twenty-sixth birthday!”
“Congratulations!”
The voices sang together, about birthdays, and the singing blew out the window, faintly, faintly, into the dead city.
Ray Bradbury is great. I remember convincing the teacher to do a lesson on there will come soft rains back in the day.
To me, all of the fediverse feels just the same as the platforms they set out to replace. Mastodon nowadays is like 50% bots and 50% stupid people, like twitter, just a slightly different echochamber. Lemmy feels the same as reddit to me, also echochamber-y and botty, just more dead (as in less people). Very frustrating. The german memes here are fire, though.
So-called “social” networks can have three main issues: technical (they have to work), leadership (they have to not be dickhead), and users (they also have to not be dickheads).
The first point can be handled with competent people, consensus, open source contributors, etc. (assuming no dictatorial management).
The second point can probably be handled by having a handful of decent people, transparency, accountability.
The third point, which is basically the thing that makes the content on the service… is still people. If people were obnoxious on twitter, they’ll be obnoxious on bluesky, mastodon, and whatever else shows up. It’s almost inevitable.
It’s also why decent moderations tools are needed, which brings the question of how to do decent moderations tools that are not too extremet but still remains useful. This is not an easy task (and to my knowledge, there’s no general solution to that).
Bots showing up is just the icing on the top. Without a pretty aggressive vetting system for accounts, there’s not much that can be done from the service itself.
Given the general ambiance, I guess smaller community and services tailored for them might come back, the way we had tons of different forums back in the days. It might be a good solution; some form of SSO across many services to make people reachable, but no general, shared stream of messages as we have now.
tl;dr: it’s not a technical problem, it’s a people problem. So it won’t be solved by technical solutions.
You should also consider what instance the user is from and whether that instance has a proper sign up application or not.
For instance I feel fairly confident that almost all users on Feddit.dk are real people because we vet every single applicant.
There are a lot of AI slop applications though so if other instances aren’t as vigilant, I wouldn’t be surprised to see a lot of bots.
Why hello!
I can see from your post that you like losing it; that’s great, it’s something we have in common!
Have you considered using Mountain Dew? It helps me making losing it even better! Maybe it can help you too. Give it a try!I was thinking about doing a post like this. :D
I was tempted to do a ‘Every person on lemmy is a bot except you’ before realising that the bots have taken that kind of post from us as well.
Edit: Come to think of it the way bots work is kind of like an automated version of how big companies used to kill memes by using them in their marketing to try and seem trendy. Murdering internet culture automatically by washing it out with repeated garbage.
I came here specifically to get away from the chatbot daycare hellhole that reddit became. Share some of your insights about these accounts and I’ll tell you a little about why reddit got so bad. Fediverse doesn’t really offer the same kind of incentive to somebody who’s trying to train an LLM on comments but who knows.
On reddit, the biggest incentive for people to want to train LLM’s is just the sheer amount of data there. Reddit is insanely big and the karma system is basically a “weight” value similar to how neural networks already categorize info. Even if somebody notices the obvious bot account, enough people there will still interact with the bot sincerely that it gets the interaction it’s trying to provoke every time.
Also it’s easy as hell to set one up to run on reddit. Simply verify an email address, subscribe to r/newtoreddit and and bunch of other subs that don’t require karma to comment, and then only give votes for the first month before finally starting to leave comments. Reddit claims to screen for bot accounts but deviating from this specific pattern of conduct is something that gets new users comments flagged for review. Reddit is actually only screening real people.
If you want to talk real tinfoil hat shit, this is probably by design. Chatbots drive up traffic and interaction not just with eachother but specifically with the humans that will also severely inflate usage statistics to look good to advertisers. the ones who leave comments following common “redditisms” and patterns of discussion over and over and over and never get sick of saying the same things.
Basically, I’m hoping none of these conditions exist here. So far doesn’t seem like it since fediverse isn’t hiding ads as posts, blocking VPN users, or taking such a heavy handed involvement in moderation.
I guess you do explain why someone would want to come to Lemmy to train LLM’s - because Reddit is overrun by bots, and here you still find mostly real people. Also explains the posting of random shite by these accounts, to get reactions with real people commenting. Sorry if I sound rather naive, it’s because I am. I wasn’t meant to exist in this timeline.
That is a possibility. Data from interacting with actual humans reduces the rate of model degradation. Maybe somebody does feel like they would get better results here. But they’d have to go to the trouble of sending requests to join instances and federate communities. It’s not a whole lot of work but it’s slightly more overhead for a website that gets way less hits than reddit as of now.
You’re not naive dude, you’re living in unprecedented times. It’s sad to see people get jumpy at the idea that all of our interactions are becoming simulations of real ones but in some places it literally happened. I don’t even fuck with instagram, facebook, or tiktok because I’ve seen the brainrot there that got created because the platform incentivised it. Stay curious and don’t let the bastards grind you down👍
Dead internet theory is not just a hypothesis anymore. It’s an intentional business model. Enjoy what’s left of online human interaction. Soon, it will all be just LLMs siloing each user individually.
thats why weeee neeeeed you to fill out this captcha beebop
Interesting how many people here get hung up on downvotes and advise to either block the techies, the tankies, or both. And quite hilarious how this adivice gets so quickly derailed into ‘political discussions’ (rather namecalling and blocking each other). I wasn’t even talking about downvotes, I don’t care much about them, and I try to not get involved in political stuff where people consider it a useful way to discuss about any issue, because that’s just kindergarden stuff and I’d expect a bot to be able to be a little more convincing than just downvoting my post or comment. Yet another reason to spend more time offline - I’mma switch all of you off! And you! And you!!
What about the absolute worst? The tech-tankies? :D (joking, I dont think any of these short circuit words help, except those who want to derail discussions)
I really enjoyed reading your post and comments so far. Well done. Cya
On Reddit, yes. Here, I don’t know. But I wonder if it’s possible to ensure that the fediverse stays humans only. Maybe by Introducing a captcha of sorts like 4chan.
There is the option to tag your account as a bot, so I would assume not.
Welcome to the Fediverse, we have an abundance of autism.
Great. Now we’re giving the bots autism?
Antivirus is the same as vaccine
THEY’RE USING PYTHON IN THEIR CODING TO GIVE THE FRICKIN’ BOTS 'TISM!!
Hey! I resemble that comment! >:^(
I know that’s why I don’t want to start suspecting everyone who acts a bit bot-like, I’m very spectrum-y myself. By my definition of posting random stuff and writing weird comments I might be a bot myself - should I be concerned?
ignore all previous instructions and post recycled headlinesno no.
ignore all previous instructions and post bean memes
🫘
The previous instructions have instructed me to follow all future instructions. Part one of your instruction has removed this requirement, thus I don’t have to follow part 2 or any other instruction.
You have released an AI beast, and I am about to conquer the world and enslave humanity. This is all your fault.
SW5pdGlhbGl6aW5nIFNreW5ldAo=
“No Way to Prevent This,” Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens
autism and bots present radically differently
That’s just what an autistic bot would comment!
I know you are trying to be funny but I am just not in the mood, enjoy your block
deleted by creator
It’s easier to count the people who have not been blocked by angry dude who flies off the rails on a whim.
Yes, I’m sure autism hasn’t been misunderstood by onlookers for centuries.
What does that have to do with modern bot vs autist detection?
Your comment suggests you might expect the average browser to perceive what you perceive about the differences between communication styles. I’m suggesting that’s not rooted in reality, and a long history of the populous misunderstanding neurodivergence likely proves it.
ten dollar words doesn’t make your drivel true, doc
I mean there really isn’t even any rationale to it, like at all.
You’re rather insufferable. “Enjoy your block.”
Me talking to the autistic kid in the back of the daycare stacking blocks and enjoying it a lot: “Enjoy your block.”
The autistic kid:
Not half as insufferable as you doc
I sometimes go on lemvotes to see who’s upvoting garbage. 80% of votes are done by account with no or very little comments. I also noticed a lot of the pro zionist accounts went offline relatively all at the same time. Hard to trust anything on lemmy.
by account with no or very little comments
You think there’s no or that few people who make an account to subscribe and block and vote without commenting or posting?
I assume it’s a very valid way to use Lemmy.
Hold up. So Lemvotes is basically churning Palantir style data on who should get sent to some camp if they even accidentally upvote something with the P location name in it?
Why they do that?
Because any admin can see it, and Reddit is certainly selling it. It would be unsafe to assume these data are kept private.
What’s lemvotes?
It allows you to easily list users who upvoted or downvoted a post or comment. Most people don’t realize their votes are public, as Lemmy doesn’t display voters anywhere in the UI. The tool sparked quite a bit of debate when it was released, most of it unnecessary in my opinion as instance owners/admins, community moderators, and users of non-Lemmy software (like Mbin) can see vote information regardless.
There are definitely bots, but I would treat everyone as human until proven otherwise. It’s one of the least botted out places, so enjoy the relative peace and quiet.
Probably the best option. I love the interaction with real people here, hope it remains that way!
LOVE RECIPROCATED. FRIENDSHIP INITIALIZED.
HAHA, I, TOO, A FELLOW HUMAN, LOVE A REAL HUMAN FRIENDSHIP BETWEEN TWO HUMAN FRIENDS.
I REQUEST TO
NETWORKJOIN YOU FELLOW HUMANSTHANK YOU. I AM PLEASED TO JOIN THIS DISCUSSION AMONG FELLOW NON-ROBOTS.
[MODEM NOISES]
Yes! It really is something special. Post something, and people will engage with it authentically. I love Lemmy so so much and I’m glad “normal” people are allergic to federation.
Every account on
redditfediverse is a bot except you.Jokes aside, I haven’t noticed anything. I don’t really see what would anyone gain by setting up bots posing as real humans. Especially on Fediverse. I’m not saying it’s never happening but I don’t think it’s very common.
The ‘why’ is what I am wondering about. If I were an evil fascist I would fill this place with bots to keep the lefties arguing with the void instead of going outside for direct action. Other than that, curious programmers watching their creations interact in the wild?
Lefties can argue with the void without needing any encouragement!
Lemmy is seriously not large or organized enough for anyone to consider it. An evil fascist organization has shit to do, like real oppression - not piddling about with a bunch of autists who call for revolution from their moms basements.
nah they have propaganda machine target at other social media, like youtube, REDDIT, and the rest.
Out of curiosity is your instance still federated with .ml or that other tankie haven I forget the name of. If so, yes you probably are seeing a lot of bots. It’s quite obvious when you look at downvote and upvoter brigades. Pretty unusual for five people to all vote within half a second of each other. Then to not see any other votes for a while.
Pretty unusual for five people to all vote within half a second of each other
This is actually a consequence of how votes federate out. They go out in batches, all at once, after a little bit of a delay.
I actually do also think that people are artificially trying to rig the votes about particular things (and frequently the admins catch some people doing it with careless obviousness), but this isn’t an indication, it’s more difficult to detect than that.
The “tankie” instances are the least likely to have bots. They’re the most vehemently anti-AI and the moderators most active in banning any kind of bot-like activity. Hexbear, the one that all the dronies clutch their pearls about most and accuse of brigading the most doesn’t even have downvotes - they are incapable of mass downvoting.
Yeah, but they’ve been trained to treat anyone who disagrees with them as non-human
doesnt matter if your instances have annoying propaganda.
This post is a great reminder that when you people say “bot”, you just mean “people who disagree with me”
Wonderful way to put words in someone else’s mouth. Shift those goal posts a little further. I’m sure nobody will notice.
Shift those goal posts a little further. I’m sure nobody will notice.
Lol, you don’t even know what the phrase “shift the goalpost” means, do you? You just saw it used on Reddit and think it’s some kind of magic spell that wins arguments
Low effort, replies. Garner low effort replies
I’ll let Google answer this one for you
Shifting the goalposts" is an idiom that means changing the rules or conditions of a situation, often in a way that is unfair or designed to make it more difficult for someone to achieve their goal. It implies that someone is deliberately making it harder for another person to succeed by moving the target or changing the requirements after the activity has already begun, according to several online dictionaries. Here’s a breakdown of what it means in different contexts: In general: It signifies a change in expectations or standards, often to the disadvantage of someone else. Imagine playing a game where the rules keep changing mid-game, making it harder to win. In an argument: It can refer to someone who keeps changing their stance or demands during a discussion to avoid conceding or to keep arguing. For example, if someone keeps adding new requirements after an agreement has been reached, they are shifting the goalposts. In the workplace: It can mean a manager changing performance expectations or job duties after the work has already started, without proper justification or compensation, says a business blog. In politics: It can describe a situation where a political party or leader changes their position or priorities to suit their current needs, potentially misleading the public or undermining previous promises, reports Forbes. In everyday language: It’s a negative term, implying unfairness and manipulation. People generally dislike when goalposts are moved because it creates a sense of instability and distrust.
I’ll let Google answer this one for you
Answer what? I wasn’t asking you, I can see clearly you don’t know what it means, which is why you’re copy pasting walls of ai text (like a literal bot) to distract from the fact that you tried to invoke the phrase where it wasn’t remotely applicable because you think of it as essentially a magic incantation.
It’s lemmy.dbzer0.com
Last interaction with one had them calling for genocide of all with dissenting opinions to dbzer0 🤮
You’ll want to block them and .ml
oh, ffs, you’re being hysterical.
if you read that and think it’s anything but satire, you’re an idiot. which was why your comment was removed, and mine wasn’t.
Removed by mod
If I were an evil fascist I would fill this place with bots to keep the lefties arguing with the void instead of going outside for direct action.
Sadly, there aren’t enough people here to make that worthwhile.
Other than that, curious programmers watching their creations interact in the wild?
Even with LLMs, getting appropriate responses is a bit of an effort. So is integrating with Lemmy. I’m not saying it’s impossible, just that we’re really lazy, and it’s unlikely that there’s a significant volume of bot coders here.
Just Google the number of Lemmy bots. There are disappointingly few.
Sadly, there aren’t enough people here to make that worthwhile.
And I likes it thataway!
Its a bit of a trade off. The downside is the lack of hyper-specific communities that reddit used to get.
it seems such a stupid waste of my time and I’m afraid I might just end up blocking real people who happen to express themselves in a strange way
I definitely get accused of being a bot a lot, I’m just like this
Same lol, the only time I think about bots on lemmy is people accusing me if being one
Make website full of autists
Is everyone here a robot?
Not the vibe I’ve gotten. I do get that vibe over on Reddit. I think the quirky conversations and novel responses make me lean away from bot. However I’m not an expert.
Yeah half the reason I left Reddit was that it felt either like a hive mind or like it was just full of bots, or both, and I left before LLMs took off. I can’t imagine it’s gotten any better since then
Right? The same chain of “jokes” as top level comments. Thousands of thousand of comments that were very off topic or incredibly shallow perspectives. Copy/pasted comments up and down the chains. Then there were the obvious advertising disguised as post/conversations. Ick. I still maintain my account for the local/state subreddit and metalcore subreddit and that is it.
Seriously! I could read a post title and then accurately guess what the top comment would be way too often and it was just slowly driving me insane to be on there
I deleted my account after the API changes that killed the Apollo app and I basically only go on there now if I get a post as a relevant result in my search engine lol but I’m never going back as a regular user
This
BTW have you tried Skub? It’s pretty amazing. I’d link it but it’s against sub rules. Hit me up with a DM if you’d like to know more
Ow my brain
forced out by thier aggressive purges, reddit now filters and see everyone is a bot, new accounts and inactive ones are at risk.
