It seems like more and more internet spaces are being taken over by bots. At some point the internet will just be AI talking to itself, while humans will return entirely to offline communication.
this is why I think its so important the fediverse put as much power as possible to the user.
but how will that solve the bot problem?
well I did not go into detail but besides allowing the users to block users, magazines, urls, instances, etc we should also be able to subscribe to folks block list. Like if I have been interacting with reversalhatchery a lot and feel hes a good bloke with his head on straight then maybe I subscribe to his block lists to get a jump start on em. could always unblock later.
Eh. "The Internet is getting worse!" sounds alot like "New cars suck!", "Politicans keep lying!" and "Everything was better back then!" - some sayings like "The young behave awful!" go back to long before the beginnings of civilisation (probably).
So I wouldn't worry much. Once humans lose interest in something, they move on and the old huts, devices and whatnot slowly erode away. Guess why we are now talking on a federated network - because those big companies started rotting away and the smell slowly starts driving people away.
Just my opinion though. It's still fun to see things crumble.
The same crap is going around Instagram and other social media pages. Often when you check out the profiles, they have some link obscured via url shortener that resolves to some random porn site or flat out scam page.
They try to comment first to get upvotes I guess.
They usually have bot accounts to upvote themselves. On reddit there were a lot of dropship scam bots, on other social media other shady stuff as you said.
I think it's likely a combination of bots made to generate "engagement" and bots trying to establish themselves as actual users so it becomes harder to spot them pushing a scam later. Content creators may pay for bots to comment to help their videos get promoted, or an enterprising individual may make a bot army to comment on a specific video and try to then sell their engagement services when that video does better. YouTube also has an algorithm for banning/shadow banning accounts pushing scams, leaving "normal" comments may make it harder for YouTube's algorithm to spot these people.
Paid for engagement.
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