Ask Lemmy

Personally, I subscribe to "Live Internet Theory." I assume that the vast majority of people I interact with are real people, and bots are very much an exception, and often easy to identify.

The Internet connects people with different views who wouldn't otherwise meet and who might not express their opinions if they did. Most of the time when I see people lob accusations of being a bot at someone, it's either because their worldview is too limited to imagine a person thinking differently from them, or they just want to use the accusation as an excuse to write them off. The reality is, I think most people who post like expressing themselves through posts, and rather than go through a bot and posting that, they just wouldn't post.

Maybe I err too much on the side of assuming people are human, but I'd rather do that than assume a human is a bot. Especially because I find the biggest "Dead Internet Theory" types tend to be insufferably unimaginative and close-minded, and I don't want to be like them.

To me, all of the fediverse feels just the same as the platforms they set out to replace. Mastodon nowadays is like 50% bots and 50% stupid people, like twitter, just a slightly different echochamber. Lemmy feels the same as reddit to me, also echochamber-y and botty, just more dead (as in less people). Very frustrating. The german memes here are fire, though.

On Reddit, yes. Here, I don't know. But I wonder if it's possible to ensure that the fediverse stays humans only. Maybe by Introducing a captcha of sorts like 4chan.

welcome to the beginning of the dead internet. i wonder if it will outlive humanity, bots tweeting at eachother and posting nonsense generated cat food recipes for nobody

You should also consider what instance the user is from and whether that instance has a proper sign up application or not.

For instance I feel fairly confident that almost all users on Feddit.dk are real people because we vet every single applicant.

There are a lot of AI slop applications though so if other instances aren't as vigilant, I wouldn't be surprised to see a lot of bots.

I came here specifically to get away from the chatbot daycare hellhole that reddit became. Share some of your insights about these accounts and I'll tell you a little about why reddit got so bad. Fediverse doesn't really offer the same kind of incentive to somebody who's trying to train an LLM on comments but who knows.

On reddit, the biggest incentive for people to want to train LLM's is just the sheer amount of data there. Reddit is insanely big and the karma system is basically a "weight" value similar to how neural networks already categorize info. Even if somebody notices the obvious bot account, enough people there will still interact with the bot sincerely that it gets the interaction it's trying to provoke every time.

Also it's easy as hell to set one up to run on reddit. Simply verify an email address, subscribe to r/newtoreddit and and bunch of other subs that don't require karma to comment, and then only give votes for the first month before finally starting to leave comments. Reddit claims to screen for bot accounts but deviating from this specific pattern of conduct is something that gets new users comments flagged for review. Reddit is actually only screening real people.

If you want to talk real tinfoil hat shit, this is probably by design. Chatbots drive up traffic and interaction not just with eachother but specifically with the humans that will also severely inflate usage statistics to look good to advertisers. the ones who leave comments following common "redditisms" and patterns of discussion over and over and over and never get sick of saying the same things.

Basically, I'm hoping none of these conditions exist here. So far doesn't seem like it since fediverse isn't hiding ads as posts, blocking VPN users, or taking such a heavy handed involvement in moderation.

Interesting how many people here get hung up on downvotes and advise to either block the techies, the tankies, or both. And quite hilarious how this adivice gets so quickly derailed into 'political discussions' (rather namecalling and blocking each other). I wasn't even talking about downvotes, I don't care much about them, and I try to not get involved in political stuff where people consider it a useful way to discuss about any issue, because that's just kindergarden stuff and I'd expect a bot to be able to be a little more convincing than just downvoting my post or comment. Yet another reason to spend more time offline - I'mma switch all of you off! And you! And you!!

Why hello!

I can see from your post that you like losing it; that's great, it's something we have in common!
Have you considered using Mountain Dew? It helps me making losing it even better! Maybe it can help you too. Give it a try!

Dead internet theory is not just a hypothesis anymore. It's an intentional business model. Enjoy what's left of online human interaction. Soon, it will all be just LLMs siloing each user individually.

I sometimes go on lemvotes to see who's upvoting garbage. 80% of votes are done by account with no or very little comments. I also noticed a lot of the pro zionist accounts went offline relatively all at the same time. Hard to trust anything on lemmy.

Yep. It fucking sucks. AI is going to be running the show soon. Honesty? At this point, i think it’s easier to just accept it as normal. There’s not much that can or will be done about it. We’re losing a big part of who we are.

And sadly, the wondrous artistry we humans once possessed will run far beyond most of our remembrance, and will be left to the musings of those unheard.