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schmorp @slrpnk.net

Bots everywhere or am I losing it?

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?

163 comments

  • 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.

  • 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👍

  • 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.

  • 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 can't ignore the technical factors. The reddit model is fundamentally a sort machine. The voting and temporal mechanism means reddit style platforms are always sorting for whatever the outcome ends up being. It's not the popular opinion nor the correct one. It's been proven time and again that the machine is easily gamed. Be early to engage with certain types of content and you're guaranteed to dominate the top of the sort.

        What we have are not naive social networks. We've arrived at some kind of simulacra. In attempting to "digitize the world" we created a mirror of real life discussion. The mirror has tarnished over time. Distorted and by now taken on a form of itself.

        It's a people problem alright. At times people seem to be playing some kind of social media game. Quite often especially on reddit people say things in ways you never hear people talk in real life. It's bizarre.

        For example making up scenarios to be angry about. What is even that??? When they have the crowd on their side then everyone is in on the game too. A rational commenter can say, "That's not possible. This scenario is completely fabricated." But it's too late. Everyone is upset and communally partaking in the original commenters rumination.

        This is a human problem but one that was arrived at by the technical design of social media nudging people into very weird forms of socialization. It's like people don't know how to be normal anymore.

        Moderators not mod tools are very important.. That word moderator doesn't mean what it used to mean. We need to examine definition of moderation. It means to avoid extreme behaviors. Moderators used to provide community guidance. To be the adult in the room. This does not exist on social media. A pillar of old messageboards were people moderators. Someone who would step in when the users misbehave. When people start talking or behaving crazy. Sometimes it was better to just remove a thread all together. These kind of things are essential in solving the people problem.

        There's no mod tool that does this. And don't nobody tell me we can throw AI at it. If social networks are to be human then it needs human guidance (aka human moderators). Can't just throw scripts at the problem.

  • 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

  • The only one I am not entirely sure about is qrstuv (or something like that) and their community Funhole. I just assume they are the same kind of weird, eccentric internet person I've known about since getting online but there are some things that make me wonder if they are actually a bot sometimes.

    Their usernsme is just kinda random. there is another user with another 5 letter username that's just random letters that responds to all their posts with the same comment. Their art is pretty unique and strange, but that could also be AI generated.

    I'm pretty sure they are an actual weirdo, but simultaneously if someone discovered they weren't I wouldn't be surprised. I do like their art, though. It's pretty rad.

    No offense to qrstuv if you are flesh and blood instead of 1s and 0s. :P

    • Lol funhole is one of the few places I feel sure there aren't bots, just weirdos

163 comments