I love the fact that fediverse was built from the ground up to be free, federated and interoperable. I have two questions that may come from my lack of expertise / knowledge, so I apologise in advance if they are dumb.

  1. Bots can disrupt smaller instances:

What is stopping corpos from scraping everyone’s posts and stuff from the fediverse and train their AI? What’s stopping them then, to create loads of not accounts and spam / disrupt smaller communities? When an instances quality drops, the users may be more incentivised to migrate to bigger instances and go there. It’s safe to say most Lemmy users are not going to spin their own instance and start communities from scratch. Meanwhile, the onslaught of bots can overwhelm these budding communities and instances.

  1. Corpos can flood the fediverse with ads and crap:

Threads comes to mind on this point and how many instances have chosen not to defederate with them. Besides, they can create bridges, and have repost bots in all instances to flood major them with ads. With generative content, it is so much easier to make a seemingly casual post about a product and mask it as an advertisement.

I’ve seen previous posts about people wanting to come because of their opinion about how certain countries behave. I feel the true evil are the corporates.

  • Remember_the_tooth@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    Thankfully, there aren’t any ads here. Just the thought of it stresses me out, and when I get stressed out, I reach for a Morley cigarette to keep my cool. The toasted tobacco and asbestos filter make for a smoother smoke, which soothes the throat. 9 out of 10 anti-ad, Fediverse, activists choose Morleys to keep up their pep and vigor in the fight against advertisement.

      • Remember_the_tooth@lemmy.world
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        9 hours ago

        Winstons?! That’s a baby’s cigarette! And I should know because our the parent company of Morleys, Philly Mortis, used to own the Croft Food company, which has a line of baby foods. Also most pediatricians prefer Morley Juniors for the little ones anyway.

        On a side note, I’ve got to appreciate the level of detail in that ad. His lighter works by rubbing two sticks together. I will never not be delighted by the Flintstones’ anachronisms.

          • Remember_the_tooth@lemmy.world
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            7 hours ago

            It really is. I guess the silver lining is that hundreds of years of smoking might at least influence our natural selection such that the average person is slightly more resistant to wildfire smoke and acetylcholine agonists/ acetylcholinesterase inhibitors. Perhaps we’ve been training for the environmental disasters and chemical warfare that climate change may bring.

      • Remember_the_tooth@lemmy.world
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        9 hours ago

        When you’re done, look inside for coupons for other quality products from Croft Foods and Jenny-Ralph Mills among others. You could be enjoying the satisfying crunch of Let’s potato chips and washing it down with a nice, refreshing can of Cuke, all while impressing your significant other by being such a smart shopper and protecting the family budget.

      • Max@lemm.ee
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        2 days ago

        thats another thing. no internet points, so no bots to farm them. upvotes really only indicate the quality of the post or comment that receives the upvotes. no way to use the total number of points to claim validity of your posts or to brag with them.

        that being said, at one point we will need to figure out a way to identify and prevent bots that just post propaganda. while we wont have the problem of karmawhoring bots, they dont have the need to karmawhore and can try to spread their propaganda immediately.

        • Kualdir@feddit.nl
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          1 day ago

          Upvotes on a comment are still internet points :p also this comment was just made as lighthearted fun not as something serious

          • Max@lemm.ee
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            1 day ago

            ok sorry :(

            i am just worried that the idea of karma on lemmy starts to gain traction :D

            • Kualdir@feddit.nl
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              1 day ago

              I never got why it was important to have “karma” tbh. Just encourages you to only post funny stuff or something the group in x community agrees with otherwise oh no you lose internet points 🫠

                • Dil@is.hardlywork.ing
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                  11 hours ago

                  I think a lot of negative karma in a month leading to red names or something with it resetting every month would be fine, I just dont like the idea of one bad take silencing someone, or one meme elevating someone

                  Instead of tracking overall points track streaks, if they get a lot of unique downvotes often flag them.

              • Max@lemm.ee
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                1 day ago

                back when reddit was not just a meme shithole, karma was used to motivate people to post quality content. 90% of the stuff posted on reddit nowadays would get downvoted into oblivion back then. typo in the title or image caption? downvoted. repost? downvoted. low effort? downvoted.

                but with growing popularity the flat number of (usually young) users grew that hat other quality standards grew and these kind of faults were ignored. meme became bigger, and there was a general shift in reddits userbase. they changed the algorith to calculate your score and suddenly you could get just so.much.karma from cheap posts.

                some communities became very strict in their content to avoid shitposts. some used karma to prevent trolls participating in their subs. nowadays high karma accounts are being sold as they can be used to participate in subreddits with a high reputation (due to participation limitations) and upvoting/downvoting and commenting on certain post can very heavily skew its visibility and impression of the discussed topic on “neutral” users.

                so yea, karma used to be a good thing (good content motivation), became a bad thing (karmawhoring), which was still utilized for good things (participation limitation), which led to even worse things (karmafarming bots).

                lemmy will have to deal with this sooner or later. there will be bots brigading communities on certain topics and there need to be some kind of indicators to distinguish honest users and trolls.