They're just standing there... menacingly!

Are bots basically scraping Reddit and reconstituting entire subs on Lemmy?

I said something about how it should be done a whole back, half jokingly.

I'm glad someone was serious.

I've been seeing some of that, but there are apparently also a ton of bots being created for who knows what reason and that's spooky. (it made the user count jump up in hundreds of thousands) Can't say I know much about that, but I'd imagine it'll cause some issues sooner than later...
- Election time. Same time bot activity gets extra crazy on Reddit. Prepare for shit-tons of propaganda.
- I had to manage some auto registered bot accounts on my test instance. They didn't do anything yet but it was pretty obvious they weren't real. Randomly generated usernames and all created within a minute.
- I wonder if it's to age the accounts..
- Reddit accounts are being sold online all the time.
  
  Creating bots is easier early on, when the securities don't exist yet. Creating an army of account is currently cheap, but may be less so in the future. They are just betting that their army of accounts are going to be valuable in the future.
That would be so cool.

The other day, someone posted a thread about instances that had just started suddenly having tens of thousands of members. That was the first I saw on the topic.

I went to one of the first ones on the list (k6qw or something like that) and it was a brand new instance with no communities, one post with one response, and 20,000 members.

So it's safe to assume they're either bots or red lectroids (have to see if they're all named John).

I bet my ass it's a bot army being built by reddit admins to flood Lemmy and destroy it - taking down their competition.

That or election interference accounts for 2024.
- The bot wars are going to be so absolutely not epic.
- Flood how? They would immediately be defederated.
  
  I don't understand why it's not already happening tbh. What are we waiting for?

I can't wait until we get bots that repeat catchphrases or tell you when your post contains all the letters of the alphabet! That was the best part of reddit!

On principle, I am downvoting any typical bot-response comments. Don't do that here, not even "ironically".
I have a thing on my phone that lets me do a ¯_(ツ)_/¯ and for some reason lt loses an arm on Lemmy. Made me so sad to realize no bot is gonna answer that.
- In programming backslash can sometimes be used to enter special characters. Maybe Lemmy also follows this syntax? If so, typing two consecutive backslashes might help.
  
  Test with one backslash:
  Test with two backslashes: \
- Here: \ you lost this.
  
  This was written by a 🤖 please don’t reply to this email
- ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Google en passant
- Holy hell
I miss stabbot, it was the best bot on Reddit.
I can't wait until we get bots that verge on gaining sentience, like good-ole u/bobby-b-bot
- Half the fun of lotrmemes was the memes, the other half was the bots talking to each other. Some were predictable, but some were so well timed it was uncanny.
And my axe!

THEY ARE COMING

someday, someone is going to invent and popularize the definite way to bind a single digital identity to a living, breathing person. That's simultaneously going to be the best and worst thing that'll ever happen to the internet