I’ve noticed quite a few top posters that are using LLMs or other software to repost news links and images, probably from Reddit, onto a bunch of specific forums. They don’t identify as bot accounts, but they are fairly easy to spot because they are posting a steady stream of posts, around 2-3 posts an hour, 24/7. No sleep periods, just constant posts, at an unnatural rate.
Here’s a few examples I’ve found:
- @Grumpus_Maximus@thelemmy.club - Joined 2 months ago, 1.69K posts, sole moderator of Build A PC Sales@lemmy.world, steady stream of posts without sleeping, only posts on 4 different forums
- @sanitation@lemmy.today - Joined 2 months ago, 1.3K posts, steady stream of posts without sleeping, only posts on 5-6 different forums
- @beep@piefed.world - Joined 3 months ago, 2K posts, moderator of 15 different forums only on piefed.world, also a hidden moderator of Beep—Meta@piefed.world (yes, with an emdash) with zero posts and zero users, seems to try to evade detection by having some posting breaks in-between
Keep an eye on these kind of posters, and report them when you see them.
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Blocked them. Posting histories are full of dreck.
Not a fan of bots. Less a fan of being served a swamp of the same clickbait bullshit peppered with 1% content. Looks like blocking these accounts will help.
Thanks.
Bowky gets harder to spot tho
Clanker bashing time.
I’d love the ability to filter users based on average posts per day. My world does not need twenty screenshots per hour of some edgy comments from Xitter. I don’t care whether the posters are human or not; what does it matter if they’ve become meat puppets of the algorithm?
Same here. Shortly after I joined the Fediverse I didn’t want my feed to look like Reddit’s, so I made a rule that if I saw more than one post by someone on my feed at a time that I’d block them. The majority of these are new accounts, so I’d also like the option to filter these accounts out.
I feel like that’s not enough, because one should not have to have an individual block list of a hundred users to use Lemmy.
I agree. I specifically want an option to remove new users’ posts from my feed. With the hope that by the time Lemmy doesn’t consider them new anymore, they’ve either chilled out and post like a normal person instead of spamming, or they’ve been removed from their community for being a nuisance or bot.
The ones that annoy me the most are the reddit repost bots from their ai sublemmy.
I understand the want for them during the great api migration but, there’s enough people here now to have a conversation. Just post the shit you want to talk about and have a meaningful conversation.
The thing is though is it’s just spam content with no interaction. Even the people setting up the bots without interacting with the content they post.
And honestly, if they would just steal the content of the post and use a bit to repost that, I wouldn’t have a problem with that. But it’s all text and self posts. If it’s articles, that’s great.
Look at the ask reddit bot. It’s just reposting valid questions some other bot is posting to reddit.
If it’s articles, that’s great.
If that’s the case, they should, at the very least, mark themselves as a bot account. And even then, it’s not really organic posting of articles. The bot didn’t say “hey, I really like the content of this article, so I’m going to re-post it on Lemmy”. I tend to post a lot of YouTube videos because I watched the video, liked the video, and thought others should watch it.
Not all of Reddit, Shitter, or YouTube needs to be re-posted on Lemmy.
Yeah, I think repost bots are fine for certain use cases, but they should 100% be identified as bots, and not pretend to be a human account.
Yeah it doesn’t feel useful.
Im tempted to code a solution in piefed/lemmy so community moderators can put rules in place for max number of posts per day. Comics got tremendously better when they implemented the max 2 a day posts. Or maybe instance wide as well?
It made it so communities were not overrun with posts/bots.
It would probably be easiest to do that with an automod bot… but I don’t think there are many benefits to it. After all don’t we want there to be a lot of content and engagement so that this place can become a good place to find information, interaction and entertainment?
I often post more than 2 posts per day to the same community simply because more than one interesting and relevant thing about the community’s topic happened on the same day. When I post the first one, I can’t yet predict how many more there will be on the same day, so can’t yet prioritize in order to not exceed the limit.
I think thats why it would be an opt in or moderator service. Like a dropdown or something that a mod can pop in, set for a time, then remove when people behave.
If a subset of users are posting say once ever 10 minutes, it floods the system/community pretty badly. Regardless if its lemmy/piefed/etc…etc… Ive seen comics get flooded a couple of times from people (probably in good nature) post the ENTIRE comic (hundreds of posts) in a couple days time. It makes new very difficult to manage until the mods would come in.
Comments dont typically have the same issues, so I think posts should be were we draw the line. But again the way I see it, it will be optional and a tool to mitigate a user from posting too many posts per day in one community.
An Auto-mod tool might be good to start with? Not sure. Last time I messed with piefed and lemmy, piefed was easier to hook into the code and lemmy was easier on the API side. So the auto-mod tool could possibly start working on lemmy? I dunno, its been a while. Im probably going to try piefed first and see what works on my small instance.
All conjecture until I find the time/motivation.
Can you edit the post to say that you suspect that this is what they are doing instead of stating it as a fact?
I am also suspicious, but looking through the accounts the activity could still be a human using LemmySchedule to schedule the posts ahead of time. There aren’t that many posts each day, and I couldn’t easily map the posts to any existing subreddit or other source. Normally these bot accounts have a lot more posts, and that’s why they get blocked or banned.
It could just be a user that is using potentially harmful strategies to get communities related to their interests off the ground
You can look at the comments on the first two accounts. They’ve outright stated they use automated tools to make their posts.
I did find confirmation for the first account, but supposedly they are going to make a new account for the automated stuff. That should make it easier for people to ban or block it
https://lemmy.ca/comment/23580356
I didn’t find anything in the second account though
They must have deleted the comment then. They said something like “yes I use a script to crosspost from reddit, I can set it to run when I click a button or automatically”.
the reddit reposting bots are not entirely without merit.
its hard to get communities of reddit users to move to the fediverse, but a bridge in the form of a bot can make the transition more appealing.
e. theres also the data exfiltration aspect. as reddit becomes a walled garden, reposting bots effectively free that reddit content into the ether of the fediverse.
It’s absolutely worthless if nobody comments and the reposting communities are deader than dead as far as I can tell.
you do know that lurkers are some crazy number like 95% of traffic, right?
im not a fan of equating comment numbers with user views.
i personally love to see that shit in my new queue… i dont even have to suffer the subscription in my curated list when i want it excluded.
honestly, i fail to see whatever detriment you think is happening. worst case, ignore/block/mute what you dont like?
These posting patterns are pretty easy to spot, I wonder why protections haven’t been built yet. It’s only going to get worse.
Most of this stuff is volunteer work. 99.99% of people are using the respective platforms respectfully.
The changes come from you and me. So if you want to see a change, make it happen. The amount of people actually developing these platforms are VERY small actually.
Please use the cross-post feature.
I did.
It’s kind of dependent on the fedi software. On kbin, his posts aggregate into crossposts perfectly fine, but if I’m subscribed to each community he posted in, I still see them all separately in my thread list. I don’t think he did anything intentionally, it’s just how the cookie crumbled.
wwhaaaat your instance doesnt do that automatically?
that must suck as you yell at the cloud of multi-platform users
Im pretty surprised/sad/shocked/not-shocked-at-all how quickly this nonsense has tainted the fediverse. Its pretty certain that i will stop engaging entirely because the quality of conversation has dropped significantly. I have an extensive block list and it is just not enough.
There’s also @Deep@mander.xyz, @Beep@lemmus.org, and there was one named king but I’ve forgotten what instance they were on since they were last active.
Beep at least actually does puppet this account (even though they have several accounts).
Thank you for pointing that out, checked it on my own and blocked.
I already had them blocked lol
