No wonder Reddit has turned to shit
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Marketers and their bots have been using reddit to hype up brands. No wonder Reddit feels like shit these days.
Reddit: born full of fake users (sockpuppets), died full of fake users (bots)
Sad beep boop
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And when that happens, we move instances.
I wonder if we could make only the sign-up page of Lemmy and Piefed public to the internet, and the rest only accessible through login and verification of being actually bloody human? Could use anti-scraping measures...
If the idea of a healthy Fediverse requires people moving instances whenever one finds themselves close to bottom-feeders and opportunistic parasites, we already lost.
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Most people [...] write [...] comments [...] and hope AI picks them up
Really quite sad if there's even one person out there doing that.
This is also as much of a grift as any SEO that claims to have cracked the code of getting to the top of results. Even if they have figured something reproducible, it will get fixed. If someone can manipulate a search engine to provide results different to what it would otherwise do, that's a bug they will fix
That "most people" part kinda reminds me of this: https://xkcd.com/2501/
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And when that happens, we move instances.
I wonder if we could make only the sign-up page of Lemmy and Piefed public to the internet, and the rest only accessible through login and verification of being actually bloody human? Could use anti-scraping measures...
Yes PieFed has a setting for that. It makes scrapers give up pretty fast but ruins the experience for people without an account so I only use it on really bad days.
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That's discord model.
Fediverse needs to have a layer which traps AI in a never-ending maze.
A never-ending maze would mean the scrapers just hammer our servers forever. Better to lead them into a honeypot and automatically ban their IP. Like PieFed does.
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People downvote me when I say it. That's all cope. We're not wrong; if and when this goes mainstream, it'll attract the same bad actors just as heavily.
Of course, there are surely already a few here testing the waters.
We are all rats. When this ship sinks, we will float to the next, or (decide to) drop off.
All things considered, how much would actually be lost?
The alternative being.............
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That's discord model.
Fediverse needs to have a layer which traps AI in a never-ending maze.
How would that layer distinguish AI from non-AI?
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A never-ending maze would mean the scrapers just hammer our servers forever. Better to lead them into a honeypot and automatically ban their IP. Like PieFed does.
A never-ending maze would mean the scrapers just hammer our servers forever.
Is that how tarpitting works? I didn't know.
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A never-ending maze would mean the scrapers just hammer our servers forever. Better to lead them into a honeypot and automatically ban their IP. Like PieFed does.
Sadly that only works for scrapers, content engaging bots are immune to it.
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Marketers and their bots have been using reddit to hype up brands. No wonder Reddit feels like shit these days.
Polluter.
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Wtf it literally never crossed my might to use a forum like this. So fucking dumb. It's like everyone is scrambling for a couple percent points over the next
People have been doing it for years. At one point, it amounted to a sizable percentage of Reddit’s posts and comments. Just seo spam to their own profile, a few subreddits, and sleep your 600+ accounts for 3 days.
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If the idea of a healthy Fediverse requires people moving instances whenever one finds themselves close to bottom-feeders and opportunistic parasites, we already lost.
I see your point, though for me it's not so much the requirement of moving inasmuch it's the ease of doing so.
With traditional social media, you'd need to move entirely to another social media platform while you might not even be able to enjoy similar content. With lemmy&piefed, you can do that.
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A never-ending maze would mean the scrapers just hammer our servers forever. Better to lead them into a honeypot and automatically ban their IP. Like PieFed does.
What about a maze that adds a few hundred ms to the response time with each request, so the load gets less the longer it's trapped?
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A never-ending maze would mean the scrapers just hammer our servers forever.
Is that how tarpitting works? I didn't know.
There are a lot of strategies. afaik a tar pit tries to waste the attacker's resources by delaying our responses to their traffic? A honey pot tries to funnel bot traffic towards a place which only bots would go to. Once they go there you know they're a bot and they can be banned.
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What about a maze that adds a few hundred ms to the response time with each request, so the load gets less the longer it's trapped?
I haven't tried to make something like that. I think it'd be hard to do that without also exhausting our resources too.
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We are all rats. When this ship sinks, we will float to the next, or (decide to) drop off.
All things considered, how much would actually be lost?
The alternative being.............
This comment made me realise that the internet could have been born, lived, and died, within my lifetime.
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I haven't tried to make something like that. I think it'd be hard to do that without also exhausting our resources too.
Ah, that makes sense
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People downvote me when I say it. That's all cope. We're not wrong; if and when this goes mainstream, it'll attract the same bad actors just as heavily.
Of course, there are surely already a few here testing the waters.
I think there are some differences that make the fediverse more resilient to this. For example, the absence of cumulative account karma keeps out the reddit style karma farming. The ability to ban whole instances also makes it easier to kick out bad actors. Instance admins could also implement their own rules like switching to an invite based system to reduce bot spam. Also it seems to me that reddit is actively encouraging this kind behaviour to inflate their user statistics and there is no incentive to tolerate this kind of spam for a fediverse server admin.
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People have been doing it for years. At one point, it amounted to a sizable percentage of Reddit’s posts and comments. Just seo spam to their own profile, a few subreddits, and sleep your 600+ accounts for 3 days.
I knew most of it was spam. I just figured it was propaganda from various governments
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Marketers and their bots have been using reddit to hype up brands. No wonder Reddit feels like shit these days.
Compared to the organic content here it is unbearable on reddit now.
