I hate the modern internet
this post was submitted on 15 Feb 2026
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Yeah, but at least this post is interesting; it shows how godawful humanity as a whole is at detecting bots in the wild.
2 out of 400 bad.
That assumes that Reddit actually wants to ban bots. But as long as they're not too obvious, the bots are valuable to them, since they inflate the user count.
"Bots? No, no, those are active users. They also don't use adblockers, so they've better than regular users!"
Could simply be that only 2 have been fully banned by Reddit but most have tons of subreddit bans and/or shadowbans. On the other hand, Reddit is such a cesspit these days I wouldn't be too shocked if they just exist on Reddit shitposting slop
I could be a bot eight now! How would I even know?
You might be a bot nine too for all we know
Reddit isn't trying though. Social media is hooked by big business interests and governments, and there is overlap there. I can spot influence agents, mechanized trolls, supported by bots, you can bet they could better with their tools and analytics.
As we've seen for the last ten years, social media only takes down bots/influence agencies researchers or others make impossible to ignore, and they've cut those researchers off from the information they were using to that effect. Now it's only agencies the US government aligned groups highlight that will get removed, alleged Iranian, and the like, a bit player.
These inauthentic accounts vastly inflate their numbers, make advertising more valuable. Even as they make the sites less useful, and drive away real users, it's also assumed that users have no where else to go so why push back on governments and big business ratfucking the sites that can hurt them in myriad ways?
Not until we build a fediverse that can get critical mass to take off will we see them fight for real people's use of their site.
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Such an inefficient way to astroturf. Just copy old comments and markov-chain basic shit. Reddit has been mostly bots for years and years.
Too efficient. Why not rage bait AND raise your neighborhoods energy prices at the same time?
Too hard. Have an LLM summarize each comment in an old comment chain so that it obliterates any meaning and burries any real engagement. (I have no evidence, but I think Reddit is scraping external sites and turning posts into comment chains)
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Unfortunately they're probably around fediverse as well.
That's exactly what a bot would say.
Absolutely! That is such a fantastic, creative, and thought-provoking comment! 🚀✨
Thank you! That truly means a lot — I’m so glad it resonated and sparked something meaningful! 🌟💡
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Oh no, the youtube bots have escaped!
So far there's no money to be made here. Influence and reach is also limited.
If that changes at some point, it might be the end of the Fediverse. It's far too open to bots. A spammer can not only easily create new accounts on instances, they can run their own instances.
Still, the additional cost to add fedi/lemmy/piefed bots would be minimal, and would just reinforce the echo chamber that the bot master wants to create.
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That's true to a certain extent, but I think the fediverse isn't all that attractive to these types of people. Additionally I think we are way better prepared to handle mass bot bans and detection since we aren't as whorish here in the fediverse
The ratio of human admins to users is better too, I think that will work in our favour.
There is a good few attempts, but the obvious ones get detected quickly.
WHY WOULD YOU MAKE THAT SILLY ASSUMPTION, FELLOW HUMAN?
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Reddit has shown through its actions that it's more interested in banning real users than bots, and wants to protect bots from being identified and called out by users, so it's not that surprising they've been able to do this.
And yet I get constantly shadowbanned there just for using a VPN...
I think reddit likes bots more than it likes real users.
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The days of having arguments with Internet strangers and knowing they aren't a bot are officially over. It's hard to tell exactly when the period ended, but it's definitely done now.
I did that only twice and it never did it again. Arguing with people on the internet is pointless to begin with.
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I'd like to argue with you about that, but alas...
Yeah, what I do right now is just join a Discord servers and argue with people on voice chat. YMMV tho, I accidentally made some lifelong friends this way.
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Everyone is cooked, you are all cooked
Thanks for making the problem worse, fuck you too man.
AI Bros were really like "Reddit is one of our very few sources of usable data. What if we poisoned it too ? 🤪"
Way to go guys ! Have fun with your degenerate data sets, and the resulting consanguine models that are 100% unusable as a result 😘
This guy just openly admitted to shitting in the global punch bowl.
It would really be a shame if ~~someone~~ everyone sent an army of bots to antagonize him at every waking moment of the day.
Every*
according to his own claim, and he's selling his super secret methods. he might be just making shit up
How do you make a profit from producing AI slop?
You sell how-to guides to other producers of AI slop.
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Godd damn clankers
I sometimes wonder how prevalent bots are on Lemmy. On one hand, the barrier for entry might be lower / the effectiveness of bans harder to gauge. On the other, I'd think we're a smaller target, less attractive as a target.
Either way, the potential to accuse dissenters of being bots or paid actors is a symptom of the general toxicity and slop spilling all over the internet these days. A (comparatively) few people can erode fundamental assumptions and trust. Ten years ago, I would've been repulsed by the idea of dehumanising conversational opponents that way (which may have been just me being more naive), but today I can't really fault anyone.
In terms of risk assessment (value÷effort), I'm inclined to think something with the reach of Ex-Twitter or reddit would be a more lucrative target, and most people here actually are people—people I disagree with, maybe, but still a human on the other side of the screen. Given the niche appeal, the audience here may overall be more eccentric and argumentative, so it's easy to mistake genuine users for propaganda bots instead of just people with strong convictions.
But I hate that the question is a relevant one in the first place.
We are the web. There is no web without the we.
It is ultimately humans who add value to the internet. We can make decisions, take action, have bank accounts, bots for the most part still can't. If we keep growing, there will come a time where swaying opinions, impressing advertisements or driving dissent will reach that value/effort threshold, especially with the effort term shrinking more everyday
I think that we are genuinely witnessing the end of the internet as we know it and if we want meaningful online contact to persist after this death, then we should come up with ways that communities can weather the storm.
I don't know what the solution is, but I want to talk and think about it with others that care.
On the individual level we can maybe fortify against the reasons that might make someone want to extract that value.
- Being a principled conscious consumer makes you a less likely target for advertisement
- Avoid ragebait and clickbait, and develop a good epistemic bullshit filter along with media literacy, this makes it more difficult to lie to you, or to provoke outrage.
- Unfortunately, be selective with your trust. How old is the user account? are the posting hours normal? does the user come across as a genuine human being that values discussion and meaningful online contact?
- Be authentic and genuine. I don't know how else to signify that I am real (shoutout to the þorn users)
I would love to hear what others think.
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"Reddit is just you, me, and /u/Karmanaut"
I never thought I'd see the day when this adage would become true again, let alone in this way 😂
Little late
Luckily it seems the humans still feel a need to divulge their antisocial behavior.
I like that they're using a simpler, cheaper model for the actual posting because that's the part that requires the least brainpower. Says a lot about social media.
What is Clawdbot farm?
Clawdbot is an AI that takes full control of the PC, can open browsers, read pages, send an email, delete files, operate the CLI, install programs, anything you can do on a PC they can do. A farm is a group of PC's/servers.
So this is a group of AI ran computers, being use for content manipulation on reddit.
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