• 5 Posts
  • 385 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • I… That’s not how this works. Or at least that’s not the context I’m referring to.

    I can make an account (or 1000, Lemmy doesn’t exactly have controls to stop me) and run it as a bot, and NOT mark it as a bot. And use it to automatically manipulate the tone of conversations and threads without anyone knowing. And the premise of your argument is now void.

    Labeling of bots is done via goodwill.

    We’re not worried about goodwill users in this context. We’re talking about astroturfing bots posing as actual users. That said, labeled bots are still a problem if their content out grows organic user content, since that just isolates us, and erodes our community in favor of w/e interesting content bots scaped up today.

    Which is a massive problem on almost every social media platform already. And will come to Lemmy soon enough.











  • You’re missing the big impact here which is that bots can shift public opinion in mass which affects you directly.

    Gone are the days where individuals have their own opinions instead today opinions are just osmosised through social media.

    And if social media is essentially just a message bought by whoever can pay for the biggest bot farm, then anyone who thinks for themselves and wants to push back immediately becomes the enemy of everyone else.

    This is not a future that you want.


  • Mhm, I love dismissive “Look, it already works, and there’s nothing to improve” comments.

    Lemmy lacks significant capabilities to effectively handle the bots from 10+ years ago. Nevermind bots today.

    The controls which are implemented are implemented based off of “classic” bot concerns from nearly a decade ago. And even then, they’re shallow, and only “kind of” effective. They wouldn’t be considered effective for a social media platform in 2014, they definitely are not anywhere near capability today.