this post was submitted on 25 Nov 2024
108 points (92.9% liked)

No Stupid Questions

35941 readers
888 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

Like people always say reddit is filled with bots, but I looked through the users of the top posts and didn't find evidence that they are bots.

Like how do you know who is a bot? Is there things to look out for?

Edit: And I'd appreciate it if there are real examples of bots getting caught and the evidence of them being bots.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] DaddleDew@lemmy.world 5 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

A minimum amount of karma is required to start threads in many communities. I used to be subscribed to a community that didn't have automated bot detection or a very active moderator and was being hit by bots posting ads to scam merchandise websites multiple times a day. Here's what I observed.

These posts had a few dozen quick upvotes over the first few minutes of being posted along with a few comments from other bots shilling the ad after being posted. These shilling comments also received a bunch of initial upvotes as well, and then all slowly got a trickle of downvotes by real humans after. Real humans also commented to denounce the scam ads a few minutes later, some of which were also receiving a sudden spike of downvotes from bot accounts. The bots would eventually get reported and banned (only from the subreddit because Reddit themselves didn't do crap about bots), and then this would repeat multiple times a day.

I've checked their post history and all of these bots were "dormant" and were farming karma by reposting content and copying comments in other subs and imitating human behaviour for the better part of a year before being activated and used to post ads.

This was only from a scammy merch selling website in a relatively small community and it employed a sophisticated network of thousands of rolling bot accounts, probably more than the number of subscribers the subreddit had. There are countless other bot operations on Reddit for advertising, scamming, astroturfing and propaganda purposes that might be even more sophisticated and difficult to detect.

I've also seen my own original content being reposted by a bot farming karma in another subreddit and I was shadow banned for complaining about it while the bot was allowed to do its thing where it went on using its karma to post propaganda.This is when I quit Reddit and never looked back at this cesspool of a site.

And all that was before AI text generation was viable. I don't know if the majority of Reddit is bot accounts, but the number of bots on it is staggering.