For the threads with the older one on the left: https://lemmy.world/post/14859950
(Thank you @Nelots@lemm.ee )
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.
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.
No, the left one is older and most the names in the right contain four numbers.
What’s going on here?
Maybe op updated the picture?
I did, because other people complained in another comment that it was confusing to not have the older thread on the left.
Anyway, it’s pretty obvious which one is which one
Thanks I almost thought I’m delusional
I also thought you were, lmao.
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yeah they did for some reason it seems
The list of names at the left creeps me the fuck out.
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.
Why not all of the above? If you have a service, you want to sell it to as many customers as possible.
Very good point.
I thought the names followed that format because that’s the format reddit used for suggestions when signing up.
I think the accounts are kind of “warmed up” this way to make them harder for reddit to identify as bots when they’re used for vote manipulation.
Like a bot that just voted in /r/politics threads world be easier to identify than one which comments here and there and gets a few upvotes itself.
Reddit is going to poison LLMs sooner than I thought.
LMAO while AIs reading training data sets get stuck in infinite loops.
Reddit probably omits bot accounts when it sells its data to AI companies
I doubt Reddit is in charge of many of the existing bots on their site.
Reddit has access to its own data - they absolutely know which users are posting unique content and which user’s content is a 100% copy of data that exists elsewhere on their own platform
I know they could be I’m just not sure they’re that competent. These bots often aren’t single user or just copy paste either, there’s usually some effort to mix it up or change wording slightly. Reddits internal search function is infamously shit but they “know” which users are unlabeled bots with some effort put behind them?
I figure it’s their absolute last priority. They might know rough bot #s, but haven’t built or don’t widely use takedown tools. There’s always an enhancement to deliver, and bots help their engagement metrics.
I know everyone here likes to circle jerk over “le Reddit so incompetent” but at the end of the day they are a (multi) billion dollar company and it’s willfully ignorant to infer that there isn’t a single engineer at the company who knows how to measure string similarity between two comment trees (hint:
import difflibin python)- To compare every comment on reddit to every other comment in reddit’s entire history would require an index, and if you want to find similar comments instead of exact matches, it becomes a lot harder to do that efficiently. ElasticSearch might be able to do it, but then you need to duplicate all of that data in a separate database and keep it in sync with your main database without affecting performance too much when people are leaving new comments, and that would probably be expensive.
- Comparing combinations of comments is probably impossible. Reddit has a massive number of comments to begin with, and the number of possible subtrees of those comments would just be absurd. If you only care about comparing entire threads and not subtrees, then this doesn’t apply, but I don’t know how useful that will be.
- Programmers just do what they’re told. If the managers don’t care about something, the programmers won’t work on it.
Doubt it, they are interwoven into almost any conversation with more than 70 comments.
If you have access to the entire Reddit comment corpus it’s trivial to see which users are only reposting carbon copies of content that appears elsewhere on the site
It’s probably not as easy as you imagine for reddit to identify and cleanse all bot content.
Of course it’s not. Nor do they want to.
I think the person you’re talking to thinks all bots are like the easy ones in this screenshot.
Look at the picture above - this is trivially easy. We are talking about identifying repost bots, not seeing if users pass/fail the Turing test
If 99% of a user’s posts can be found elsewhere, word for word, with the same parent comment, you are looking at a repost bot
That’s easy in an isolated case like this, but the reality of the entire reddit comment base is much more complex.
The low level bots in OPs screenshot, sure, because it’s identical. Not the rest.
I used to hunt bots on reddit for a hobby and give the results to Bot Defense.
Some of them use rewrites of comments with key words or phrases changed to other words or phrases from a thesaurus to avoid detection. Some of them combine elements from 2 comments to avoid detection. Some of them post generic comments like 💯. Doubtless there are some using AI rewrites of comments now.
My thought process is if generic bots have been allowed to go so rampant they fill entire threads that’s an indication of how bad the more sophisticated bot problem has become.
And I think @phdepressed is right, no one at reddit is going to hunt these sophisticated bots because they inflate numbers. Part of killing the API use was to kill bot detection after all.
Reddit has way more data than you would have been exposed to via the API though - they can look at things like user ARN (is it coming from a datacenter), whether they were using a VPN, they track things like scroll position, cursor movements, read time before posting a comment, how long it takes to type that comment, etc.
no one at reddit is going to hunt these sophisticated bots because they inflate numbers
You are conflating “don’t care about bots” with “don’t care about showing bot generated content to users”. If the latter increases activity and engagement there is no reason to put a stop to it, however, when it comes to building predictive models, A/B testing, and other internal decisions they have a vested financial interest in making sure they are focusing on organic users - how humans interact with humans and/or bots is meaningful data, how bots interact with other bots is not
It’s account farming. They make fake accounts look legitimate so they can use them to influence opinions on the site.
They also use them in groups of 3 to lure people to malicious sites and scam sites. Especially fake merchandise sites.
Basically replaying a thread to make it look like there’s activity in the sub.
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The left predates the right by 10 months
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory
I didn’t believe this when I first heard about it but it’s looking more true everyday
Yeah, even if we’re not quite “there” yet, it feels like we’re at least moving in that direction
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.
I have a more realistic description of “Dead Internet Theory” that involves no conspiracy theories:
The Internet is becoming a monoculture, which is killing the vibrant, diverse, resilient, innovative space it used to be. Manifestos about a better way of life, and creative personal websites have been replaced with vapid social status posts in bland bootstrap layouts that double as data collection schemes. Technology that empowers people has been replaced with technology to restrict people. Bots masquerading as people is just the cherry on the sundae, the inevitable outcome of having created such a monoculture, a place where large orchards of content are so easy to pollute. The modern Internet ducking sucks, it has been ruined by people.
Reading the Wikipedia it seems quite unlikely, but then again maybe it’s also written by a bot.
As a human I think the Wikipedia article is correct. I’m not a bot (drinking water right now- bots cannot do this).
I saw a movie where bots had a kind of food & drink bag inside their belly to correct whatever they put in their mouth so they could emulate biologicals.
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.
I remember when the narwhal used to bacon only at midnight.
Now the narwhal is forced to bacon continuously.
This kills the narwhal.
🤮
Narwhallaire bacongrind moment
The narwhal bacons your data at midnight.
The pigs fly at midnight, but believe not what they say, for they tell only treacherous lies.
This.
They lost so many users they needed the “engagement” numbers for the IPO so they opened the flood gate. Now they are stuck with an issue they can’t fix without admitting the fraud.
How far does it have to go before investors start to care I wonder? I somehow doubt OP is the only person capable of perceiving and documenting this.
Where as it is shifting to a front for Gov. Psy Ops just like Xitter, investors don’t matter.
Never trust a default username
[adjective] [noun] [3-4 digits] is always a sign of bad news, on social media and Xbox Live
And here I thought making a default username looking one was a good idea…
I’ve switched to name generation to stay extra anonymous…
Yeah, that’s what I was going for, I wanted a very typical name.
the John Smith of our times
Cutesy auto generated names are too useful for bots, the lazy, and fans of cutesy name combos.
Should have made defaults your approximate IP geolocation. I’m kidding of course for privacy reasons, but a little similar motivation to think about a better name during creation couldn’t hurt (looking at Reddit here).
Edit: but hey - maybe it’s not desirable for one to be able to distinguish users. I wonder… nah, Reddit would never… 😒
This dude is from Pennsylvania.
I don’t know about that. I now stick to default names after HR told my department to help them identify some leakers on reddit.
Usually Xbox Live has XxxNAMExxX
When you use “connect with Apple” it creates an account with a name constructed this way.
You can change it afterwards but no one does.
EDIT: Wait, is it the default Reddit way?
Yeah I think any account you create now has that as the default. Or at least did a few years ago.
So it’s really more of a “many new accounts are bots” rather than “you can distinguish bots by this account name format”.
Reposts has always been a major issue on reddit, there are an infamous moderator who would delete posts with traction and repost it himself for karma.
Using bots to duplicate comments on reposts is a new low though.
Is it new? I got the impression that’s also been going on a while.
It’s definitely not a new issue, but it’s only gotten worse since reddit has gone more and more mainstream.
If you follow me on Lemmy since last year, you should know that I’ve always been extremely against having bots posting here.
I’ve always been extremely against having bots posting here.
As are all who live to see such times.
Except certain transparent bots that serve a clear, particular purpose. Like, we could have a bot that adds a new honorific to your description every time someone says, “oh hey, I saw a Margot Robbie on TV! Is that you?”
MargotRobbieHonorificBot: That’s Her Esteemed Greatness The GOAT Academy Award Deserver And Future Empress Of The High Seas Margot Robbie!
This bit is way funnier when it’s a real person saying it instead of a bot.
What if it’s an actress, does that count? Or is it like, yeah, that’s just her character saying that.
-insert [human] honorific string of adjectives here, on behalf of Margot Robbie.
I very much remember this being an issue a couple years ago
Esteemed, world-renowned actress Margot Robbie?!
That’s esteemed Academy Award nominated (and incredibly humble) character actress Margot Robbie to you!
You’re the second best character actor name Margo(t), but with Margo Martindale existing, being second is still a great achievement.
My apologies
yep that’s really her
I had almost forgotten about him. Wouldn’t he also post obvious ads to the hundreds of communities he moderated, and bend the rules so that technically the posts belong?
moderator who would delete posts with traction and repost it himself for karma
I’ve had this happen to me, it felt so fucking wrong lol. My thread got deleted by the mod and he reposted it as a sticky on his own name without so much mentioning me.
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.
I am sad that the current generation of federated social media/networks still doesn’t have much, if any, implementation of web of trust functionality. I believe that’s the only solution to bots/AI/etc content in the future. Show me content from people/accounts/profiles I trust, and accounts they trust, etc. When I see spam or scams or other misbehavior, show me the trust chain connecting me to it so I can sever it at the appropriate level instead of having to block individual accounts. (e.g. “sorry mom, you’ve trusted too many political frauds, I’m going to stop trusting people you trust”)
I think this would be a great feature request: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues
I would definitively use it if it was implemented. Make it work like it is in GPG, where you can rank users based on your trust, and that is then propagated to others.
This concept reminds me of a certain browser extension that marks trans allies and transphobic accounts/websites using a user aggregate with thresholds that mark transphobes as red and trans allies as green.
I guess the question is how specifically you implement such a system, in this case for software like Lemmy. Should instances have a trust level with each other? Should you set a trust when you subscribe to a community? I’m not sure how you can make a solution that will be simple for users to use (and it needs to be simple for users, we can’t only have tech people on Lemmy).
I think that there would probably have to be some database, somewhere, to store that data?
For the simplest users, my initial idea is just a binary “do you trust them?” for each person (aka “friends”) and non-person (aka “follow”), and maybe one global binary of “do you trust who they trust?” that defaults to yes. anything more complex than that can be optional.
But how does this work when you follow communities? Do you need to trust every single poster in a community?
You’d see posts in a community/group/etc based on your trust of the community, unless you’ve explicitly de-trusted the poster or you trust someone who de-trusts them (and you haven’t broken that chain).
Right, so if I have no connection to someone else, it’d be “neutral” and I’d see the post. If I trust them transitively, then it would be a trusted post and if I distrust them transitively, it would be a distrusted post.
I think implementing such a thing would not only be complicated but also quite computationally demanding - I mean you’d need to calculate all of this for every single user?
Yes! Web of trust is the only way. Everything else can be scammed. I am kinda wondering if it could be invites and if severing could be automated for social media. “We just banned a third person who came in on your invitations. Goodbye.”
Definitely something that will emerge in the future once we’ll inevitable get bots here too
That sounds smart!
That would be awesome, cause you would still be able to see your mom’s post!
Honestly I already believe that this has happened.
My reason for thinking this is because of this:
The spike that happened on October 2023 after the initial spike that happened due to the Reddit protests seems unnatural to me.
Someone gave the explanation of the release of the mobile clients but even then I wouldn’t think it would lead to a spike equivalent to the initial one since it would mostly just be people using an account they already had instead of creating a new one.
Like honestly if someone knows what event happened then that made so many new users join I’d appreciate it.
I didn’t get into Lemmy until there was a mobile client available, Sync to be specific. I believe it since a lot of Reddit users were basically mobile only. So, for a few months I basically subsisted on YouTube alone.
I feel your pain. I also tried Instagram to satiate the mobile scrolling, but the comments there are just horrible and low-effort. The fediverse via Sync is okay, but there’s still much to be desired.
Is your issue with Sync or with the current state of the fediverse?
The current state of the fediverse. Sync is great!
Sync came out in August tho, I used Connect in the meantime lol
Sync is only one of many clients. And when it came out wasn’t the point of my post. But if no big clients came out in October then they couldn’t have been a factor at all.
That is sorta my point, I don’t know how much mobile app releases factored in to the spike back up in October. It probably did have some effect though
Newer user here… the api stuff got me to delete my reddit account but still surf it, it was the day of the IPO that i created my lemmy account…
Welcome! Let us know if you have any question.
Welcome new person, best start brushing up on beans and jeans if you want to survive.
That happened in March 2024 I think. And Reddit filed for the IPO in December 2023.
https://www.reuters.com/markets/deals/reddit-seeks-launch-ipo-march-sources-2024-01-18/
The day it IPOd on the market was my final day not the day of filing… I was holding out hope it wouldn’t happen lol…
Fair enough
Is that just accounts in total or active accounts?
I didn’t comment much in the beginning.
Now I try to comment at least once a day.
accounts in total.
Wait, then how would it go down? Are people deleting their accounts that much?
Entire instances disappear as well.
Apparently. But it seems like it only happened around the beginning after the second spike it stabilized for some reason.
Okay then I will admit, it does seem fishy.
That’s been happening for ages. I’m sure if you check the profiles you’ll find other posts with all the same bots commenting. A lot of lazier ones wait exactly a year to repost, and it’s pretty obvious in subs for something like a live service game where they’ll be reposting complaints that are way out of date. One in the Monster Hunter sub reposted a trailer for Iceborne which had been out for 3 years by that point.
These are probably the bots that will be paid for creating content too. lol
My favorite reposts were the ones that were only like 6 months later, so they’re talking about christmas or r/place as if its that time of year when its the total opposite.
I’m mildly annoyed the recent thread is on the left not the right, but this is super interesting so thanks for sharing! 🤖
Feel free to edit the image to change the order, I would update the post with the updated version!
Thank you, updated on LW, should federated to other instances as well! https://lemmy.world/post/14859950
Give them some credit. They’ve finally changed the user name generator to random words instead of Adjective_Noun_####.
They have not, left is the more recent post. The right one could be real and is just recreated by these bots.
I agree, credit retracted.
No, I think those comments are just unwitting humans walking into the simulation.
“It doesn’t look like anything to me.”
Adjective_Noun_#### are default generated by reddit, so they upgraded to their own generator at least it seems.
shit like this was happening before the exodus, you’d go into one thread then the other where it’s crossposted, and it’s the same comment, but with some dot, commas in weird places and it’s a reply to another comment and doesn’t really makes sense.
oh and youtube comments are full of nonsensical AI convos that like recommend financial advisors, or coins to invest in, like bruh
True, that did happen before but the OP image shows something different. It’s not just a few comments copied over to the new post it is every single comment copied exactly the same as the original.
Just paid a visit. It’s really gotten bad. Horrible titles that make little sense. People falling over each other to make tired quips instead of conversation, and the rest to point out how someone is wrong or one-up the commenter.
That’s what it has been like for years now.
IMO it’s gotten markedly worse since the 3rd party app debacle. Perhaps combined with the advent of AI added to bots has made it obvious. Yeah, it’s been on a decline for quite a bit with the repost bots repeating everything from posts to replies, but people would call them out. Now it’s like it’s bots all the way down or the remaining participants have resigned themselves to the decline.
Small subs still seem mostly safe, but anything with decent participation is pretty bad.
Yeah the only real reason for Reddit for me anymore is sports discourse. E.g. the Baltimore Orioles are my MLB team. /r/Orioles on reddit has almost 80k members. Currently on the page there’s 62 people actively in the sub and that’s at 10am on a Wednesday, not during a game. The two Orioles communities on lemmy are Orioles@fanaticus.social and Baltimore Orioles@lemmy.world and they have 133 and 131 subscribers, respectively. There’s a bot posting game day threads and 0 comments in all of them. The only post not by a game day bot was 21 days ago.
Yeah I feel you, at least the Orioles team is super stacked rn though (speaking as a Yankees fan 🫠). !yankees@fanaticus.social is equally dead.
My current thought process is that if we can get a decently active generalized baseball community going, it could provide a stepping stone to increasing the activity in the team-specific communities. I’m trying to be active on !mlb@lemmy.ml and !baseball@fanaticus.social as much as possible.
There is already a latent population of sports fans on Lemmy, but it’s sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy that the communities aren’t active so people assume there must be no other fans.
My other thought on this topic is that although I do miss the active fan discussion and game threads, the subreddits for essentially all of my teams were indisputably toxic cesspools. The whining, armchair GMing, scapegoating, and just completely idiotic takes were out of this world. So it’d be nice to have activity, but too much activity can also degrade the quality of discussion to the level of Twitter and just create a very toxic environment where fans are constantly arguing and complaining.
Username checks out. Which client are you using for Lemmy?
I switch between Mlem and Voyager (iOS). I like them both, but I tend to use Voyager more. Mlem tends to give me more variety of communities, I like Voyager’s layout.
Reddit went to shit when the zoomers flooded in, arguably the late 90’s kids aswell
Lmao! Dead internet theory!
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I’ve noticed that many Reddit users with the username format
Word_Word_Number(for exampleAbsolute_Bot_1230) are almost guaranteed to either be a bot or extremely inflammatory – it’s like everything they post is meant to generate controversies.Just said on a Reddit r/worldnews’ thread that the subreddit has been astroturfed for years, as a response to someone wondering how could people in the comments be wishing for more innocent Palestinians be killed, and surprise surprise, I got instabanned. The site is becoming a façade of a fake reality in far more ways than one.
r/worldnews is just a propaganda sub disguised as a hub for world news.
I was permabanned from r/worldnews for saying we should give free meals to kids at schools here instead of wasting money blowing up other country’s kids.
