Ask Lemmy

Not the vibe I’ve gotten. I do get that vibe over on Reddit. I think the quirky conversations and novel responses make me lean away from bot. However I’m not an expert.

People on here are not subject to algorithms. There is no algorithmic manipulation to some sort of hive mind. Oh. And some use LLMs to translate their posts.

Not bots. Who would develop propaganda bots to for lemmy just to spite 1 particular person.

I don't block users, I have a "firewall" on my brain (metaphorically speaking). I over analyze every comment, its kinda like a "spot the bot" mini-game.

I estimate there are like 1/3 bots especially on very heated political memes on the front page. I'm automatically just blocking out the "voting is useless, don't vote" sentinment, very unproductive. Also idk wtf is with the "don't protest, revolt now, kill [insert name of politician] right now", like why the f would you say that on the open internet where there are government automatic data scrapers archiving all this for evidence? (Remember you can get extradited for making threats) Like jokes sure thing, but don't be that explicit lol. Fed-posting is so common lol.

The less political, the less "bot-like" it feels.

I get what you mean, that's why I always overthink every comment and scan for like everyone's profile.

Hey... Wait a minute...

GET DOWN, JOHN CONNOR. THE OP IS A TERMINATOR /j

I've noticed a lot of weird comments taking extremely obvious jokes entirely literally but as the others have said there's an abundance of autists here so it's hard to say.

If it reassures you, I personally haven't perceived too much bot activity here, at least not compared to Reddit. Either they're much stealthier here, or they're not here in much force.

Something I've seen on Reddit several times now, but not here, is obvious bot vote manipulation. I.e. you would go to, for example, a subreddit of a niche music artist, a newish account will make a post linking to some really obvious scam merchandise site for that artist, it would be replied to by several collaborating new bot accounts expressing desire for said merchandise and they'd all be upvoted, and regular users calling out the scam or bot activity get massively downvoted. Eventually it gets deleted by a human moderator. Not seen anything like that here.

I'd imagine Lemmy is less vulnerable since it's small, bot makers will gain more for targeting bigger sites like Reddit, and I hope if it got bigger here the decentralised setup would give ways to defend against it, like defederating instances (temporarily if appropriate) that have been compromised by a lot of bots.

I think the trap is that you should look for accounts that seem extra normal. Those are your typical bot accounts. Impeccable spelling, and more elaborate structure than you'd typically find in a social media comment, but very "locally plausible" content.

In my experience accounts that seem weird are run by weird humans.

Your explanation of why you think some users are bots is too vague. I myself was accused of being a bot once