With all these new bot instances popping up, have you already seen these accounts actually raiding stuff? And can/do we defederate from those instances?
CW: Homphobia. I’ve only seen one thread attacked by a bot so far. It repeatedly posted a loooong homophobic comment pretending to be a thoughtful and objective analysis of why gay men have lower life expectancy due to being “sExuaL” and apparently “DiSeAsEd”. It posted the same comment multiple times in the thread and responded to multiple comments including its own with the same comment over and over again. Not super jazzed to see that crap here, hoping we can avoid a botpocalypse on the Fediverse.
I had to remember where I blocked that “user”, it was over on my Kbin account. Here is the user if anyone wants to preview them and preemptively block them: https://kbin.social/u/dickusmungus/comments
Hey thanks for the link. That is a sad account.
No problem! I went back and looked through the comments and posts again and now I’m uncertain if it is actually a bot or just a really sick person acting like one. Either way, I’ve blocked them. I was on a thread about cookies missing chocolate chips of all places for that nonsense to show up.
It actually seems like a person when I looked but still the behaviour seems worthy of a block just to avoid that first 5 seconds of confusion if you stuble upon a comment.
Downvoting bot spam actually does help. Good UX should hide unconstructive comments anyway. Will there be trash? Yes, but it’s more or less under control on Reddit because of user voting effects.
The real danger is in letting bots vote more than letting them comment or post. We’re safe as long as humans can outvote the bots… but will that status quo continue? That’s our biggest existential risk.
Oof. Yeah, I hope that too.
You can hide bot accounts in the settings.
That assumes they were registered as bots, doesn’t it?
Exactly. If they’re bots but not registered as such, just report them.
I think the point of these bots is that they try to make themselves appear not like bots in order to steer the direction of discussions. That and upvoting the agendas they want to push and downvoting perspectives they disagree with.
These spam bots wouldn’t list themselves as bots so that wouldn’t work
You think people would lie like that??
Everybody is a bot except for you.
That’s exactly what a bot would say…
That’s exactly what a bot would say…
Unless I am…
I haven’t seen any posts or comments that are obviously bots, except for useful ones that make it clear what they’re doing.
I think they’re just making accounts, not using them yet.
I haven’t seen anything yet either. I think they’re lining up for the assault.
Nah, I think they’re just being mass-created. No one’s actually spamming anything so far. You can see so on this directory of instances: https://the-federation.info/platform/73
If you scroll around you’ll find some that have like 10k or 20k users and 11 posts at most.
Wish there was an in-built feature to block entire instances just for this case. Some of them have 30k users with only 10 active users.
