Comic Strips is a community for those who love comic stories.
The rules are simple:
Web of links
There's an increase of bot (I suppose) accounts who post a single or a few comics and delete their account.
One of the issue is that they're often divisive posts ("men bad", "women bad", "old bad", "young bad", ...) like they're trying to stir up some shit (is "9gag-isation" a word ?)
I'm not sure a simple rule to prevent new account (less than X days) from posting would suffice but I have no other idea.
How could this community deal with this phenomenon ?
PS : I'm not a mod btw, but I didn't see any rule about discussing the moderation, and I've seen other comments about this
Edit: they made a "tatann_2" account to post a few comics so it's obviously a troll
Edit 2: and now I'm getting downvotes on my posts/comments, even old ones, at least I've pissed off the troll
I am pinning this post because I think it is a global Lemmy problem, and debating this issue is necessary to find ways to decrease this type of spam.
Personally, I am reluctant to implement solutions like 'account age verification' or 'maximum daily posts' because this also affects legitimate users. However, we may need to do this if we do not find better solutions.
I agree, when I joined lemmy I was annoyed I couldn't post in some communities because my account wasn't at least 30 days old. This would be a temporary fix.
And thanks for acknowledging the issue
Thank you. Sorry you’ve got to deal with this as I’m sure it’s no fun, but yeah it’s becoming a huge problem here.
There needs to be something done!
I’m getting these pathetic losers now going on downvoting sprees after I’ve been calling out their bullshit account spam.
Regular users aren’t spamming more than 10+ posts a day unless they are one of the handful of accounts that post a billion links and have some bot set up for posting. (Some bots are absolutely borderline spam but at least those accounts don’t get deleted)
FWIW most of these "kamikaze" accounts seem to be on the lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works instances. I think lemmy.world might require an admin to manually approve new accounts -- there's a delay between application and account creation. And they explicitly state they don't allow people to create accounts using temporary email addresses.
sh.itjust.works seems to allow anonymous account creation. Still, it might not be bots/API abuse; the accounts might actually be created by hand by someone very motivated to post and delete for... some reason.
But why these two instances in particular, I wonder?
Edit 2: and now I'm getting downvotes on my posts/comments, even old ones, at least I've pissed off the troll
If lemmy had a shared tag system, and easier way would be for automod to tag new users and auto delete posts from users that delete themselves.
That way everyone would know its a new user posting and could just choose to take the post with skepticism.
This seems to be rising to a problem that would require admin level tools.
Just a thought.
I've noticed a ton of these too: it seemed to have started right around New Year's.
As someone who typically scrolls All, I'm not even sure if it's specific to this community. There are a lot of Comic and Meme communities where these things are getting posted across various instances. I'm still not sure whether this is nefarious or someone trying to grow Lemmy. Could just be some college student trying to test out making bots, posting things they genuinely like. Though I have noticed most of the comics tend to em have divisive elements or say things that are obviously wrong. It seems like their goal might be to drive comment engagement.
So I've been marking them with UserNotes as "Comic Bot" and usually just do voting and moving on. Occasionally commenting to draw attention to the user history for others.
I tried bringing this up and got downvoted pretty hard last week. We have accounts that will post a huge amount, slam servers all in one go, then disappear. Its causing issues with federation. Especially with smaller instances.
I like comics and prior to say a couple of months ago, it was a great conmunity.
It's mostly annoying me because it's affecting federation - not just the ability for new instances to backfill content, but for established instances to even be able to fully resolve a new post's details before the author nukes themselves. For example, the previous post (titled "Paranoia") isn't available on lemmy.ml or lemmy.dbzer0 because they would have been a few seconds "too late" to fetch the details for the author.
@lawrence@lemmy.world - if you'd like another mod to help out in the short term, I'm happy to volunteer. I realise people in the comments are being a bit defeatist about the ability to reckon with this problem, but whoever this person is should at least have to do a bit more work than they're currently doing.
Edit: they made a "tatann_2" account to post a few comics so it's obviously a troll
Edit 2: and now I'm getting downvotes on my posts/comments, even old ones, at least I've pissed off the troll
You too huh? I made a similar comment and got the same downvote brigading and copycat account shit.
Cockroaches really don’t like it when you shine a light on them.
Mods really need to do something about this shit.
I downvote you because I only like baggedtuna.
/s I hope obviously
🤮 doesn’t sound appealing lol
This is just can propaganda!
we can see your downvotes @cohen_drz@lemmy.world
Just address us what this is all about.
The account is deleted now, but theres still records: https://piefed.social/user/lookup/cohen_drz/lemmy.world
Piefed keeps the accoint just for this reason.
I'm not sure a simple rule to prevent new account (less than X days)
This would work reasonably for about X days. Maybe.
Well I guess "they" could program bots to start posting only after X days, but still better than nothing for now
...and obviously I can't see any of it because their posts are gone, too?
Can you put some numbers on this?
Can anybody confirm?
It could be some sort of Streisand effect brought on by people complaining about "bot accounts" for days/weeks now.
People thinking something like "You scared of trolls? Lol, let's troll you some more!"
Also, some of those accused seem like very normal people to me who also comment in other communities and do not, in fact, delete their account.
edit: somebody created an account 1h ago, only to downvote every single comment in this thread. No content.
I'm just a random, but I've seen it as well over there last few weeks. Much more obvious when browsing by hot or new, and then the author isn't findable from dbzero anymore. Or if they are, it's the only post, it's bait, and then they disappear. Hard to track.
I can confirm.
On piefed, you can usually see if new accounts are posting given a little wheel icon on their account. It helps making visible the account(s) are flooding the community.
Plus if you have a single user instance you can easily look at the logs and find the accounts again.
I've seen discussion of this occurring in other communities too (can't remember which tho, sorry), and stumbled upon a few of those posts too where post and user were gone (i've always got a tab with piefed open, and don't always refresh the page when it's been not too long, so i still see the post as active when in reality it's been deleted already), so i can attest to this happening.
eta: the content seems to be divisive, and it's definitely every day, but i can't make a good estimate of the amount of this type of post happening
Daaamn I was also thinking about writing a post after yesterday "men bad" comics, I support doing something. Ban specific comic authors?
You could block the author if it's a link to his website, but for posted images, how could lemmy detect the author without scanning (AI ?) the author's name in the picture ?
Manual mods action after user reports? I was just brainstorming, I'm not sure
I think the way forward as the next line of defense is to vet accounts. This has been suggested before and I believe quite a few instances do it already. Similar thing on Mastodon.
It doesn't have to be a strict process, to start with anyway, but at least require people to write a quick paragraph of why they want to join.
It does mean more work, though. But I think if it became the norm, instances can be straight-up blocked who don't do have this process, even if many people use it. As people will see the good stuff is elsewhere and anyone who cares enough will do this little extra step. (the philosophy of being active in good places to grow them)
Other people have written about this more eloquently and with stronger arguments. :)
I don't think that's a very good idea to be honest. "Why do you want to join Lemmy?" "Because I want to shitpost". I probably wouldn't write it because I can't be bothered.
Bots can just be created on other instances with no verification and post here, so that would makes no difference.
But I think if it became the norm, instances can be straight-up blocked who don’t do have this process, even if many people use it. As people will see the good stuff is elsewhere and anyone who cares enough will do this little extra step. (the philosophy of being active in good places to grow them)
In other words. If this became a real thing, any respectable instance could just not federate with instances that don't have this process.
Aren't new instances federated by default? Then botfarms can spin up instances at will and spam before being defederated.
I'm out of my depths here. Automatic federation seems like something that shouldn't be a technical necessity though.
I hope others will chime in on this thread :)
Automatic federation is one of the strengths of Lemmy, without it it wouldn't be really decentralized in my opinion. But I've already responded twice to you without saying what would work, so what do I know.
at least require people to write a quick paragraph of why they want to join.
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I'm a volunteer and can't read this shit. DENIED.
Another idea is to work with it in the meantime. Threads like this make people aware. Comics that make fun of this stuff or show the opposite side of the coin, etc.
Alright, I spammed the thread enough 🤐
spoiler
🤪