Lemmy has multiplied it’s number of users (maybe more accurately accounts) in just few days. How much do you think is the percentage of bot accounts? Is Lemmy having problem with bot farming?

  • DerWilliWonka
    link
    fedilink
    2
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    What is something someone can gain by swarming an instance or forums like yours with bots? I cant wrap my head around it. Also if someone has an instance and swarms it with bot accounts, it may seem like you got a popular instance but where is the revenue if there are noone who is able to click an ad? Do they do it just for the lols?

    • GizmoLion
      link
      fedilink
      71 year ago

      Spin up 50 bots.
      Sign them all up for lemmy.
      Let accounts interact/age.
      Sell accounts to companies who want to advertise as one of the cool kids.

      Happened on reddit nonstop.

      • TheDeadGuy
        link
        fedilink
        3
        edit-2
        1 year ago

        Any conversation, be it political or commercial. All it takes is something sounding confident, a grain of truth and lots of upvotes to convince people.

        That’s why I like seeing downvoted as a red flag people can pay attention to

        • GizmoLion
          link
          fedilink
          21 year ago

          Pretty much why Reddit removed downvotes I think… brands got tired of users raining downvotes on them for shilling lol.

            • GizmoLion
              link
              fedilink
              11 year ago

              I feel like you’re reading a completely different conversation…

              • fu
                link
                fedilink
                11 year ago

                @GizmoLion @realcaseyrollins @1337tux @DerWilliWonka @TheAngryBad its not likely, but with how the Fediverse works its possible, whether slow federation between certain servers (for example I frequently will have posts Friendica tells me have posted to 130/135 servers within a minute but those last few can take days or never post at all) also you guys might not both see the same conversation based on who you’ve blocked, or been blocked by, etc. If you ever want to verify, you should be able to view it on their instance (on Kbin this is what is listed under MORE as LINK TO FEDIVERSE)

                  • GizmoLion
                    link
                    fedilink
                    01 year ago

                    Looks like you are @ing someone I can’t see.

                    Well, that’s the first major point against this fediverse business… Who’s going to stick around to have a conversation when everyone’s only getting bits of it? That’s kinda antithetical to discussion…

        • DerWilliWonka
          link
          fedilink
          11 year ago

          I have some tiny bit of doubts left but at least it does sound like one possible reason for people swarming servers with bots

      • adamthinks
        link
        fedilink
        11 year ago

        Except that Lemmy doesn’t show overall karma, so there’s no use in doing any of that here.

        • GizmoLion
          link
          fedilink
          11 year ago

          Just the same, having a post history and upvote history lends credibility to the “opinion” of the brand.

    • fu
      link
      fedilink
      21 year ago

      @DerWilliWonka @1337tux @TheAngryBad there are cetainly some who do it for the lulz, and there are some who probably do it as a way to encourage others to make security changes to the platform. Personally, I think it would be more useful to file issues via git, but what do I know, I’m just an old-timer who quit college after failing security class, and thereby losing my scholarship.

    • TheAngryBad
      link
      fedilink
      11 year ago

      In my particular case (as was the case with most forums in the day), it was really just about spamming boards with links to whatever shitty ED pills or crypto scam they were trying to sell.

      They were never really sophisticated, but never really had to be either. A spammer could spend a few minutes writing a script for a bot to crawl the web looking for phpbb signup pages, then try to create an account on any it could find and immediately post the links. They could post hundreds of links on dozens of different forums with just a few minutes work - and then do it all again tomorrow with a bunch of new signups.