AskReddit is over run by bots

This for sure. It's something severely lacking at Lemmy, without the large user base the small communities can't sustain the way they do on Reddit. Lemmy serves best as a replacement for the biggest subs.

The user volume to support niche communities is the most obvious thing missing in Lemmy. But I have a darker view of the future. Picture LLM bots forging organic-looking conversations that result in a product recommendation. It looks like a genuine human conversation, but it’s actually an advertisement. Maybe it’s mixed with some human comments, but that may only add to the realism of the fraud.

That kind of ”advertising“ could potentially command a lot of money. And it could probably eventually infect just about any text platform. Maybe Lemmy as well someday?

You could deploy it pretty effectively in sufficiently large niche communities.

Yep I can confirm, I lived in my tiny reddit bubble a lot of time to care about trending shit and bots stuff.

Exactly. In specific communities it's by far the best discussion platform. And I don't go to a site first discussion second, other way around, so to reddit I go for those.

People go there because they don't care about interacting with other human beings. They just want an echo chamber and to occasionally feel like they are an Influencer.

And you can see the same at lemmy. Someone posts something someone doesn't like? Immediate downvote (and, for the more pathetic people, downvoting on a few alts as well) with no comment or even attempt to refute things other than MAYBE an ad hominem. And plenty of "What is your favorite X" spam-engagement posts that just involve repeating whatever marketing schpiel they heard in the past.

There has been a recent tendency for people to reference social media network sites that are nothing but bots and... it is increasingly obvious that that is what most people want. They want to feel like they are the tastemakers. They want to be moistcritical without needing to focus test the most normy of center-right takes.

It's not even mine, I put the source in the post.

But I agree with the poor colour choice

Not necessarily. Bots can read text equally well on any colour. This might prove he is a bot.

Now this truly does sound like a horrifying story.
Move over McRib, 'cause here comes Georgie "Please Let Me Die" Pie, even less often than you do!

Imagine if McDonald's had actually defeated Jollibee in the Philippines, absorbed them, then resuscitated their menu once a year.
But that didn't happen, I wonder how did Jollibee not only survive, but thrive? What was their crucial chessboard move there?

The fact that they polled customers afterwards points to this being a simple corporate fuckup. This kind of thing regularly happens as well where I live despite noncompetes basically not being enforceable.

Acquiring companies is easy, but it extremely rarely goes well. The incentives and skills required to buy something and give a sales pitch to a private equity firm simply do not overlap with the incentives and skills required to vertically integrate that thing without completely destroying it.

In many ways these corporate ghouls are like serial hobbyists. Buying all kinds of expensive toys and tools they don't understand then breaking them and/or giving up.

Yeah. That or niche subreddits that just aren’t popular enough to warrant bots. Like specific game communities. But even some of the big ones are full of bots.

Have you ever noticed those low effort reposts also getting the same top 10 comments as the original? It's slop all the way down.

What’s the aim? What do they use the accounts for once they’ve acquired the karma, which I am assume is the goal.

The difference between now and then though, is they were a private company.

Unless they disclose they use bots to post content and make the site look active, any use of user count and engagement for any aspect of the company becomes fraud as its misleading investors.

Oh we have 1 million posts an hour! Fraud.

Oh we have 100 million monthly active users! Fraud!

Investors Q/A - do you use bots? Answer No. Fraud.

Conspiracy: Reddit sells bots and bot acquired analytics to high paying corpos, but are losing sales to secondary markets undercutting the reddit sold bots.

The 9Gag way...

Could also be so they can make more ad money, since it makes it look like more people use the site, and more people see the ads. Allows them to get more money from advertisers.

My friend still uses reddit

Not just political, it helps brands advertise as well

Yea same. Now that you mention that, gaming really is one of the only reasons I’m on there anymore. Destiny for example, still has a pretty active sub. But to your point, the couple discord groups I’ve joined over the past couple years are way better.

You should make one!

for real!! im also currently fixated on tamagotchis and the tamagotchi sub is the only active community i could find, im pretty sure tamatalk has been dead for a while :[

Create one, friend! It'll start off slow, but it may build up.

That's true but those bot networks were easy to find with reverse search. There were different types of bots and the clever ones went under the radar easily.

dark red on grey

I have tried to read that text on my desktop PC, so I was visiting regular site, but I must say that the picture is much clearer on my phone.

I guess it's mostly because my gaming monitor is not that good at displaying colors or some other shit.

Examples of what? Marketing teams? Check out a company called bent pixels.

To see it in action, check out r/marvel.

As far as culture jamming it goes, I don't have many because it gets your account banned pretty fast.

There is definitely money to be made. Whether it is shilling for a product or even attempting to inflate market share in the hopes of converting said market share into either donations or outright selling to investors.

Yeah, I don't think they have figured out how to properly manipulate lemmy yet (I have seen a shocking amount of facebook "why don't these kinds of posts go viral" levels of nonsense, for example). But bots are cheap and to pretend that there is not an active effort to figure out how to manipulate us is naivety, at best.

Maybe it is just that I am an old. I watched reddit fall. Hell, I watched fucking gamefaqs "fall". Not to mention usenet and the rest. Because the reality is that where there are people, there is money. And modern day advertisement techniques (whether it is AI bots or just people in a warehouse in the global south) are increasingly cheap.

Indeed. It’s a problem for any online platform, but the hope is that it’s a self-limiting problem here because of the natural segmentation of the network and given than admins aren’t trying to sell advertisement views.

Oh fuck I blew my cover

There are bots and astroturfers on Lemmy now to be clear, just not nearly to the point of the disaster that is R-town. That said, it's not nearly as bad. The point i wanted to make is that federation is the one thing protecting Lemmy from corporate bot/shill takeover. The way Lemmy will be reddit'd/digg'd would be if centralization of servers became high enough that corpo corrupted ones become the defacto servers, who'd cut federation with the smaller privately-owned instances we currently enjoy.

Hold on just a darn tootin’ minute here. That there’s robot speak, ain’t it? We don’t take too kindly to robots, fella. Are you a robot, or ain’t you? We’ll defederate you mercifully.

copying and pasting a comment is still less genuine, since that promotes stale and outdated information. It can also create the false idea of a "widely held" opinion rather than a single person's opinion copied a dozen times.

makes sense but i remember i saw peoples dms they say wild nsfw stuff and one time someone dmed me a dagger for sale