Social media platforms like Twitter and Reddit are increasingly infested with bots and fake accounts, leading to significant manipulation of public discourse. These bots don't just annoy users—they skew visibility through vote manipulation. Fake accounts and automated scripts systematically downvote posts opposing certain viewpoints, distorting the content that surfaces and amplifying specific agendas.
Before coming to Lemmy, I was systematically downvoted by bots on Reddit for completely normal comments that were relatively neutral and not controversial at all. Seemed to be no pattern in it... One time I commented that my favorite game was WoW, down voted -15 for no apparent reason.
For example, a bot on Twitter using an API call to GPT-4o ran out of funding and started posting their prompts and system information publicly.
https://www.dailydot.com/debug/chatgpt-bot-x-russian-campaign-meme/
Bots like these are probably in the tens or hundreds of thousands. They did a huge ban wave of bots on Reddit, and some major top level subreddits were quiet for days because of it. Unbelievable...
How do we even fix this issue or prevent it from affecting Lemmy??
As others said you can't prevent them completely. Only partially. You do it four steps:
The sad part is that, if you go too hard with bot eradication, it'll eventually inconvenience real people too. (Cue to Captcha. That shit is great against bots, but it's cancer if you're a human.) Or it'll be laborious/expensive and not scale well. (Cue to "why do you want to join our instance?").
Actual human content will never be undesirable for bots who must vacuum up content to produce profit. It’ll always be attractive to come here. The rest sound legit strategies though
You're right that it won't be completely undesirable for bots, ever. However, you can make it less desirable, to the point that the botters say "meh, who cares? That other site is better to bot".
I'll give you an example. Suppose the following two social platforms:
If you're a botter advertising some junk, you'll probably want to bot in both platforms, but that is not always viable - coding the framework for the bots takes time, you don't have infinite bandwidth and processing power, etc. So you're likely going to prioritise Orange Alien, you'll only bot White Rat if you can spare it some effort+resources.
The main issue with point #1 is that there's only so much room to make the environment unattractive to bots before doing it for humans too. Like, you don't want to shrink your userbase on purpose, right? You can still do things like promoting people to hold a more critical view, teaching them how to detect bots, asking them to report them (that also helps with #4), but it only goes so far.
[Sorry for the wall of text.]
This is the sort of thoughtful reasoning that I’m glad to see here, so a wall of text was warranted! Thanks for taking the time to add to the discussion 👍🙏
Bots can view content without being able to post, which is what people are aiming to cut down. I don't super care if bots are vacuuming up my shitposts (even my shit posts), but I don't particularly want to be in a community that's overrun with bots posting.
Yeah, after all, we post on the internet for it to be visible by everyone, and that includes bots. If we didn't want bots to find our content, then other humans couldn't find them either; that's my stance on this.