Given the state of technology, politics, and social media, we all share fears about interacting with bots, or having our social media manipulated. We know that this is happening on other platforms that are driven by engagement/profit models. However, Lemmy is about people – like you! While this platform is not immune to bots, we have several layers of protections in place to remove bots and trolls as quickly as possible.
Some of these operations are performed automatically at a server level, and you likely never see them at all. Some rely on the reporting system and the common sense of our userbase – that’s you again! If you believe that another user is a bot, please report it and our mod team will investigate. Please keep in mind that real people really do have radically different points of view. Not everyone who disagrees with you is a bot or troll. Do not abuse the report system.
We encourage the expression and discussion of different points of view, as long as the discussion is civil and in good faith. It is not a civil form of disagreement to call another user a bot or paid actor in posts or comments. It is a personal attack, which is a violation of our first rule. We have updated the language of the rule in our sidebar to reflect this. Our first priority is for the safety of our users to express their ideas. Thanks!
- Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
I banned some of the most obvious and prolific shills from my instance and there was a small but noticeable drop in server CPU load. Their posts are not the cause, it’s all the comments on their posts and the votes on all of that. Those are being discarded instead of processed.
Their effect should not be underestimated.
Is this Beehaw?
I remember seeing the defederation from Lemmy.world announcement, saying (as I remember it) that as much as they weren’t happy about taking that step, the flood of unwanted garbage was getting too overwhelming for any other realistic approach. I thought to myself, whoa that’s weird. Then I hung out on Lemmy.world for a while and said oooh this is what they were talking about, this is fuckin unpleasant.
Dude the tankies when I first joined Lemmy I thought were awesome; I went in and argued with them about the Ukraine war. I actually learned a bunch of stuff although not exactly what they were attempting to teach me. This relentless tide of single comments always on the same handful of talking points is something entirely different.
As if they have a script, I don’t get it. You have to agree to a lot of historical revisionism to shill it tho.
It was so weird. But enjoyable to me.
Actually, I remembered that I think I accused one of them, or many of them, of being bots, so maybe that sort of undoes my “no no I would never do that to someone just because they disagreed with me” thesis 🙂
The thing is, something really weird happened that made me think it. I said something along the lines of “hey this source is actually really good, I don’t agree with the conclusions you’re drawing 100%, but thank you for sending it to me I learned a lot” and got back a response like “how can you ever expect to learn anything if you’re just dismissing sources out of hand etc etc, you need to open your mind and be open to opposing points of view, you’re just being ignorant”… I don’t remember it exactly, but it was a response that when I looked at it, I realized would be a sort of boilerplate comment that would serve as a generic hostile response to almost anything. And, by sheer stupid dumb luck, it happened that it was total non matching nonsense to this total unusual backwards degree as applied to what I had actually said, which was a sort of unusually friendly and open-to-discussion response.
It was like the “They Live” glasses came on, and I started looking at every response in the thread like that. Like what the fuck is this? Was that guy just not reading what I wrote and in some sort of hategasm where he was just typing anything… or am I in a bot lobby right now? What the fuck is going on?
IDK, I never really figured it out. But it was definitely very weird. Definitely some of the people in there were real human tankies and like I say I learned a decent amount by talking with them (for way too fucking long, IDK why). But it was, now that I think about it, my very first encounter on Lemmy with some user that made me wonder what the fuck was even going on on the other side of the keyboard because it made literally 0 sense at all, what had just happened.