So, tangentially related to this, you know r/kitty? The subreddit where every post was a picture of a cat, and the only word permitted in the title and any comments was “Kitty”?
I’m convinced that was being used for covert communications. Run those pictures through Outguess or something.
How do you track down the sheer number of them so efficiently? You could obviously dig through each one’s profile, but that wouldn’t work for hundreds or thousands.
Lol. There is no way to do it efficiently. I did it in the way you described every time, and I reported literal thousands to reddit’s admins (and never got a single response) and was banned by multiple subreddits because I was “annoying” when I reported bots to sub mods. I also called bots out in comments and provided evidence when I did. Nobody cared.
When reddit killed 3rd party apps, I rolled out. I didn’t realize how bad reddit had become and how much I hated the site. I’m much happier here with less content and without a bot infestation. Additionally, I’m sure users, mods, and admins WOULD care if I reported that sort of thing on Lemmy
Oh man, I used to see you around constantly. I believe you posted about your methods at one point and I started following them. Hunted down quite a few bots as well!
For the subs I modded, my main strategy was to just ban any NameName or NameName## accounts that could post, and remove any comments from them that were super short or contained a link. That cut down on a ton of those assholes.
I actually got to talk in person with one of the admins at Reddit in charge of spam prevention. I basically gave the bastard a lecture in all the ways the spammers were spamming and scamming. Got told they’d follow up with me soon for more. Never got that follow up and I gave up caring once the API changes went through. I actually deleted all my anti bot code from the subs, but they’re still all private anyways
Tbh I always ignored users like you because they added nothing to the conversation and were annoying.
My usual response was “Neat. Now report it and stop posting and bragging” or people callung the sleuth bot for reposts.
Considering how often Lemmy has posts reposted (I can see the same meme twice or thrice per week in the same community instance. My default sorting is ‘rising’).
I generally agreed with this sentiment, but the fact that admins and mods didn’t care makes me understand why they felt the need to point it out in the comments.
As long as the mods and admins care about removing bots instead of just wanting an inflated user base I think the comments about bots should stay confined to posts like this one where they are on topic.
the fact that admins and mods didn’t care makes me understand why they felt the need to point it out in the comments
That is EXACTLY why I did it. I thought that if I could get more users to report those accounts, and if they did, the mods and admins would do something about it.
Not coincidentally, /r/wholesomememes was the worst of all the subs. The overwhelming majority of obvious organized bot rings were operating there. The mods told me they knew and didn’t care because it was an opportunity for users to see content they hadn’t seen before (completely missing the point)
As a former mod, in my experience it was more having a place to engage a community, and helping that community grow and improve. Reddit being a million dollar company when I started and a billion dollar company when I left didn’t really factor in. If you have a site split up into a million little communities, you need moderators that can have intimate knowledge of each community they oversee, and that’s unreasonable for a company of any size to do in house. Otherwise you have Facebook style moderation where it’s just plain dreadful no matter where you are.
Additionally, it really matters what sized sub you modded.
I modded mostly smaller subs, one big one for a while, and a default for 2 weeks. I put a lot of effort into the smaller subs, especially when it was just a few people whose usernames I recognized posting. I had little jokes hidden around, some cool CSS stuff, and some automated tasks. It was an enjoyable way to spend a couple hours a week. I didn’t mind it.
The big sub I was on mostly through mutuals. I was known to be pretty decent with automod scripting, so I got brought in to deal with never ending spam. I would update the automod and check queue every couple days, no biggie. Then the rest of the mods all drifted offline, leaving me alone to either let the sun die or to try and maintain the damned thing.
I maintained it near single handedly for like 2 years. It was mostly adding more and more to automod, but a lot was manual approvals and deletions. It sucked and sapped all the fun out of an activity I used to enjoy. Wasn’t the worst, but I wouldn’t have joined in the first place had I known why would happen.
Default subs are a different beast entirely. They don’t even use automod half the time. All of them have custom bots that link either a slack or discord, and everything is run externally through there. I decided to dip when I asked how tf all their tools worked and got refered to almost a damn knowledge base. That truly seemed awful and like it needed to be done by dedicated and paid employees.
Anyways, this comment spiraled, so sorry about that.
Was anybody under the impression that it wasn’t just account harvesting? It’s been that way for years. All of the default subs have been that way for a long time. The biggest clue is when you see the same post on multiple different subs at the same time. Just have your bot swarm upvote posts so that they take off under hot and you’re good.
Yeah, although I find that even some if the subreddits for shows that are not discussed on reddit are pure trash, The Boys comes to mind since they got really explicit and conservatives realized the show is making fun of them, the discussions around episodes are just trash
PieFed
I was a bot hunter on reddit and was asked to mod /r/kittengifs because of my ability to find them. There were like 5 legitimate posts in 6 months
So, tangentially related to this, you know r/kitty? The subreddit where every post was a picture of a cat, and the only word permitted in the title and any comments was “Kitty”?
I’m convinced that was being used for covert communications. Run those pictures through Outguess or something.
Ah yes, the famous Russian
NumberKitty StationsThere was r/catsstandingup(?) as well that just responded “cat.” Never considered the conspiratorial angle there…
If I cared about reddit anymore, I’d dig into that
I mean I can think of worse ways to send messages to my sleeper cells across the surface web. I used to watch The Modern Rogue.
How do you track down the sheer number of them so efficiently? You could obviously dig through each one’s profile, but that wouldn’t work for hundreds or thousands.
Lol. There is no way to do it efficiently. I did it in the way you described every time, and I reported literal thousands to reddit’s admins (and never got a single response) and was banned by multiple subreddits because I was “annoying” when I reported bots to sub mods. I also called bots out in comments and provided evidence when I did. Nobody cared.
When reddit killed 3rd party apps, I rolled out. I didn’t realize how bad reddit had become and how much I hated the site. I’m much happier here with less content and without a bot infestation. Additionally, I’m sure users, mods, and admins WOULD care if I reported that sort of thing on Lemmy
Oh man, I used to see you around constantly. I believe you posted about your methods at one point and I started following them. Hunted down quite a few bots as well!
For the subs I modded, my main strategy was to just ban any NameName or NameName## accounts that could post, and remove any comments from them that were super short or contained a link. That cut down on a ton of those assholes.
I actually got to talk in person with one of the admins at Reddit in charge of spam prevention. I basically gave the bastard a lecture in all the ways the spammers were spamming and scamming. Got told they’d follow up with me soon for more. Never got that follow up and I gave up caring once the API changes went through. I actually deleted all my anti bot code from the subs, but they’re still all private anyways
Tbh I always ignored users like you because they added nothing to the conversation and were annoying.
My usual response was “Neat. Now report it and stop posting and bragging” or people callung the sleuth bot for reposts.
Considering how often Lemmy has posts reposted (I can see the same meme twice or thrice per week in the same community instance. My default sorting is ‘rising’).
I generally agreed with this sentiment, but the fact that admins and mods didn’t care makes me understand why they felt the need to point it out in the comments.
As long as the mods and admins care about removing bots instead of just wanting an inflated user base I think the comments about bots should stay confined to posts like this one where they are on topic.
That is EXACTLY why I did it. I thought that if I could get more users to report those accounts, and if they did, the mods and admins would do something about it.
Not coincidentally, /r/wholesomememes was the worst of all the subs. The overwhelming majority of obvious organized bot rings were operating there. The mods told me they knew and didn’t care because it was an opportunity for users to see content they hadn’t seen before (completely missing the point)
Do you mind share tips to know how to spot them?
It:
The stock photo sites are watermarking AI-generated images now?
That’s their txt2img thank you very much
This right here is a bot comment. Everyone take notes.
Okay what was kittengifs, because I’m ashamed to admit my first thought was not short videos of baby cats.
It was baby cats
Okay good
So I’d say the posting frequency here on Lemmy is pretty good then!
Hahahah! *«strAdditional_CommentDFF4»*
It's odd how often I <java.lang.ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException> myself as well.
Sure, I have an image like that: ![](data://hEmQAObamAIAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
Hello world
As a large language model, I don’t have an opinion on this subject.
Quality over quantity.
Except when the quantity is so low it is not even with checking.
Are you checking for hot, 6 hours and 12 hours? I think it defaults to active which does make it seem, ironically, less active.
I’ve been on “New, 6 hours” since the beginning and even that seems stagnant. At times, there’s lots of cross posting.
I’m guessing you do subscribed as well. I’ve also found it kind of nice to be able to leave and get on with my day. Reddit used to suck me in.
this
Edit: Apparently some people missed the irony.
The italics are a nice hint. Good Poe’s Law submission.
The reposts are more atrocious here because lemmy can’t think of new stuff and resort to classics and to death reposted memes
Or bots that just repost reddit content… or users who repost reddit content.
Damn reddit, they ruined reddit.
Bots don’t upvote. There’s so much voting activity here as a ratio to actual contributions that my first impression was that the votes might be faked.
I wonder if they didn’t block the bot that approves content…
Haha, moderator approval on Reddit.
Boggles the mind how they work for free for a business.
Someone should start a reddit replacement and we should all move there last year
That would be something, wouldn’t it?
We can dream.
!remindme -1 year
As a former mod, in my experience it was more having a place to engage a community, and helping that community grow and improve. Reddit being a million dollar company when I started and a billion dollar company when I left didn’t really factor in. If you have a site split up into a million little communities, you need moderators that can have intimate knowledge of each community they oversee, and that’s unreasonable for a company of any size to do in house. Otherwise you have Facebook style moderation where it’s just plain dreadful no matter where you are.
Additionally, it really matters what sized sub you modded.
I modded mostly smaller subs, one big one for a while, and a default for 2 weeks. I put a lot of effort into the smaller subs, especially when it was just a few people whose usernames I recognized posting. I had little jokes hidden around, some cool CSS stuff, and some automated tasks. It was an enjoyable way to spend a couple hours a week. I didn’t mind it.
The big sub I was on mostly through mutuals. I was known to be pretty decent with automod scripting, so I got brought in to deal with never ending spam. I would update the automod and check queue every couple days, no biggie. Then the rest of the mods all drifted offline, leaving me alone to either let the sun die or to try and maintain the damned thing.
I maintained it near single handedly for like 2 years. It was mostly adding more and more to automod, but a lot was manual approvals and deletions. It sucked and sapped all the fun out of an activity I used to enjoy. Wasn’t the worst, but I wouldn’t have joined in the first place had I known why would happen.
Default subs are a different beast entirely. They don’t even use automod half the time. All of them have custom bots that link either a slack or discord, and everything is run externally through there. I decided to dip when I asked how tf all their tools worked and got refered to almost a damn knowledge base. That truly seemed awful and like it needed to be done by dedicated and paid employees.
Anyways, this comment spiraled, so sorry about that.
Poor little vasals on poor little anthills.
That is what a bot would say
I am a bot, and this action was peformed automatically.
Was anybody under the impression that it wasn’t just account harvesting? It’s been that way for years. All of the default subs have been that way for a long time. The biggest clue is when you see the same post on multiple different subs at the same time. Just have your bot swarm upvote posts so that they take off under hot and you’re good.
So I know my wife still uses Reddit, if the dead internet theory is to be believed either she’s a bot or I’m a bot…
Can someone help me click this box?
That’s kinda astonishing. I mean, I knew there were a lot of bots, but that many? That’s crazy. How did they filter for bots?
I think it was OC only not “no bots”
“A few year away”
Lol, have you tried searching for a “how to” article in the past five years?
No wholesome humans left. Bots are nicer confirmed.
I for one welcome our new wholesome bot overlords!
More about it here: l.opnxng.com/…/we_need_your_oc_wholesome_memes_pl…
I misread that as Lemmy community for the same. Hopefully we are still got a lot of time before it hits us.
When did this happen?
l.opnxng.com/…/we_need_your_oc_wholesome_memes_pl…
Amazing. I almost want to tell them to come over here but then I’d have to use reddit.
Are bean memes wholesome?
Only if they’re whole beans. Split beans don’t count.
Only if they’re wearing jeans, otherwise they’re nsfw.
… I am somehow completely missing two days worth of memories, completely blank.
I hope it’s not related.
I had blocked that subreddit after few posts from there popped up in /r/all.
It was a hugbox of toxic positivity.
Why are you still using reddit
Many niche subreddits, my country specific subreddit. I browse reddit along with lemmy but post only on lemmy.
This is the way
Yeah, although I find that even some if the subreddits for shows that are not discussed on reddit are pure trash, The Boys comes to mind since they got really explicit and conservatives realized the show is making fun of them, the discussions around episodes are just trash
Because sometimes you need more posts than Lemmy can provide
Sounds like an addiction tbh
Sure is.
Sounds like a wild judgement of another person who you know nothing about.
Not that wild considering they know it is.
Because such was the style at the time.
But now we Lemmy!