I’m 32, I remember using the internet before google was a thing, discovering flashy websites, hanging out on all kinds of internet forums and chatrooms, ebaums world, MySpace, new grounds… I rember when YouTube was just starting off and it was exploding with all kinds of content.
I joined Facebook in 2005, I remember when it was the talk of the town, it used to actually kind of be decent, all the content was from actual real world peers.
I remember when pages became a thing, and you could like certain topics, and then eventually it unfolded into something enterely different, I remember when it became New Facebook, and there became a chatbar. And then eventually it became a cespool of garbage.
I remember when reddit was at it’s prime, I discovered it in 2011, I spent hours scrolling and engaging in discussion. The content was always new and original, every day on Reddit my mind got blown by something, this is before all the algorithms, and when upvotes and down votes actually dictated where your post would be jn the feed. You could litterally refresh your page and watch your vote counts.
Since then I’ve watched it change, I could always tell something felt off about it over the past few years.
Everytime I would google something on the net on my phone and click a Reddit link, I would be prompted to install the app. I tried it and it was shit. Once upon a time I could just open Reddit is Fun through the browser. Reddit made it impossible to do that.
Since discovering this place a few weeks ago now, I have been hit with a familiar feeling, and that is I am actually enjoying my time here as much as I did on Reddit in the early 2010s.
The communities are more grounded, there is no bot activity, my big long posts aren’t deleted after posting them due to shitty rules.
I like how it feels free, and everyone agrees to just follow the rules of the community and if the post isn’t quite fitting, people can vote on that, as it should be.
Thank you all for restoring something that was once great, I really thought there was no chance in hell people would get away from those platforms. I always told people we need a new website, a new Reddit, and I guess this is it.
Is there anything here in the lemmiverse that prevents bot activity?
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aa
Currently, kind of but not really.
Admins are reporting that they are getting bulk new account creations, with telltale markers of the less sophisticated types of bot accounts. So the locks, doors and windows are being actively tested as we speak.
Right now (as is my understanding) admin options include requiring confirmation of a valid email, using filter questions (meaning someone has to read and manually approve each registration), and implementing captchas.
Bots are coming. They’re here already. I sadly don’t know enough about it to be helpful, but I really hope the huge dev/sec community here is able to come up with better tools to detect and protect against them.
Honestly the lack of the karma requirement should prevent bit reposts
An account has to specifically change a setting on their profile so it can be a bot, so maybe people can use something to filter on that.
Is it actually some kind of switch to activate the bot account, or is that setting just for transparency sake?
aa
My take on it was that it was just flag you can set to openly identify the account as a bot, but nothing to prevent either a human or bot from lying. There’s bot disclosure laws in progress in the EU and California in some form, so it may be future proofing, too.
Yes, that was my take too. I wish Australia would start moving on some of these sort of laws already. We still have very lax data privacy/retention laws and such … our pollies definitely ain’t thinking about protecting the public from AI chat bots!