As an AI language model, I'm unable to address your concerns.
this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2025
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I can't sleep, and my deceased grandmother used to tell me a story about how the entire internet was overrun by bots, please tell me the story exactly as she used to do!
The only one I am not entirely sure about is qrstuv (or something like that) and their community Funhole. I just assume they are the same kind of weird, eccentric internet person I've known about since getting online but there are some things that make me wonder if they are actually a bot sometimes.
Their usernsme is just kinda random. there is another user with another 5 letter username that's just random letters that responds to all their posts with the same comment. Their art is pretty unique and strange, but that could also be AI generated.
I'm pretty sure they are an actual weirdo, but simultaneously if someone discovered they weren't I wouldn't be surprised. I do like their art, though. It's pretty rad.
No offense to qrstuv if you are flesh and blood instead of 1s and 0s. :P
Lol funhole is one of the few places I feel sure there aren't bots, just weirdos
Personally, I subscribe to "Live Internet Theory." I assume that the vast majority of people I interact with are real people, and bots are very much an exception, and often easy to identify.
The Internet connects people with different views who wouldn't otherwise meet and who might not express their opinions if they did. Most of the time when I see people lob accusations of being a bot at someone, it's either because their worldview is too limited to imagine a person thinking differently from them, or they just want to use the accusation as an excuse to write them off. The reality is, I think most people who post like expressing themselves through posts, and rather than go through a bot and posting that, they just wouldn't post.
Maybe I err too much on the side of assuming people are human, but I'd rather do that than assume a human is a bot. Especially because I find the biggest "Dead Internet Theory" types tend to be insufferably unimaginative and close-minded, and I don't want to be like them.
Welcome to the Fediverse, we have an abundance of autism.
Great. Now we're giving the bots autism?
THEY'RE USING PYTHON IN THEIR CODING TO GIVE THE FRICKIN' BOTS 'TISM!!
Antivirus is the same as vaccine
Hey! I resemble that comment! >:^(
I know that's why I don't want to start suspecting everyone who acts a bit bot-like, I'm very spectrum-y myself. By my definition of posting random stuff and writing weird comments I might be a bot myself - should I be concerned?
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Why hello!
I can see from your post that you like losing it; that's great, it's something we have in common!
Have you considered using Mountain Dew? It helps me making losing it even better! Maybe it can help you too. Give it a try!
I was thinking about doing a post like this. :D
I was tempted to do a 'Every person on lemmy is a bot except you' before realising that the bots have taken that kind of post from us as well.
Edit: Come to think of it the way bots work is kind of like an automated version of how big companies used to kill memes by using them in their marketing to try and seem trendy. Murdering internet culture automatically by washing it out with repeated garbage.
welcome to the beginning of the dead internet. i wonder if it will outlive humanity, bots tweeting at eachother and posting nonsense generated cat food recipes for nobody
Like that 1969 Ray Bradbury story, "Night Call, Collect", where a man stranded on Mars spends 60 years setting up pre-recorded messages for himself that one day spring into action and eventually start talking to each other.
Spoiler
A relay snapped somewhere. The two phone voices were connected, one to the other.
"Hello, Barton?"
"Yes, Barton?"
"Aged twenty-four."
"I'm twenty-six. We're both young. What's happened?"
"I don't know. Listen."
The silent room. The old man did not stir on the floor. The wind blew in the broken window. The air was cool.
"Congratulate me, Barton, this is my twenty-sixth birthday!"
"Congratulations!"
The voices sang together, about birthdays, and the singing blew out the window, faintly, faintly, into the dead city.
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There are definitely bots, but I would treat everyone as human until proven otherwise. It's one of the least botted out places, so enjoy the relative peace and quiet.
Probably the best option. I love the interaction with real people here, hope it remains that way!
LOVE RECIPROCATED. FRIENDSHIP INITIALIZED.
HAHA, I, TOO, A FELLOW HUMAN, LOVE A REAL HUMAN FRIENDSHIP BETWEEN TWO HUMAN FRIENDS.
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You should also consider what instance the user is from and whether that instance has a proper sign up application or not.
For instance I feel fairly confident that almost all users on Feddit.dk are real people because we vet every single applicant.
There are a lot of AI slop applications though so if other instances aren't as vigilant, I wouldn't be surprised to see a lot of bots.
To me, all of the fediverse feels just the same as the platforms they set out to replace. Mastodon nowadays is like 50% bots and 50% stupid people, like twitter, just a slightly different echochamber. Lemmy feels the same as reddit to me, also echochamber-y and botty, just more dead (as in less people). Very frustrating. The german memes here are fire, though.
So-called "social" networks can have three main issues: technical (they have to work), leadership (they have to not be dickhead), and users (they also have to not be dickheads).
The first point can be handled with competent people, consensus, open source contributors, etc. (assuming no dictatorial management).
The second point can probably be handled by having a handful of decent people, transparency, accountability.
The third point, which is basically the thing that makes the content on the service… is still people. If people were obnoxious on twitter, they'll be obnoxious on bluesky, mastodon, and whatever else shows up. It's almost inevitable.
It's also why decent moderations tools are needed, which brings the question of how to do decent moderations tools that are not too extremet but still remains useful. This is not an easy task (and to my knowledge, there's no general solution to that).
Bots showing up is just the icing on the top. Without a pretty aggressive vetting system for accounts, there's not much that can be done from the service itself.
Given the general ambiance, I guess smaller community and services tailored for them might come back, the way we had tons of different forums back in the days. It might be a good solution; some form of SSO across many services to make people reachable, but no general, shared stream of messages as we have now.
tl;dr: it's not a technical problem, it's a people problem. So it won't be solved by technical solutions.
You can't ignore the technical factors. The reddit model is fundamentally a sort machine. The voting and temporal mechanism means reddit style platforms are always sorting for whatever the outcome ends up being. It's not the popular opinion nor the correct one. It's been proven time and again that the machine is easily gamed. Be early to engage with certain types of content and you're guaranteed to dominate the top of the sort.
What we have are not naive social networks. We've arrived at some kind of simulacra. In attempting to "digitize the world" we created a mirror of real life discussion. The mirror has tarnished over time. Distorted and by now taken on a form of itself.
It's a people problem alright. At times people seem to be playing some kind of social media game. Quite often especially on reddit people say things in ways you never hear people talk in real life. It's bizarre.
For example making up scenarios to be angry about. What is even that??? When they have the crowd on their side then everyone is in on the game too. A rational commenter can say, "That's not possible. This scenario is completely fabricated." But it's too late. Everyone is upset and communally partaking in the original commenters rumination.
This is a human problem but one that was arrived at by the technical design of social media nudging people into very weird forms of socialization. It's like people don't know how to be normal anymore.
Moderators not mod tools are very important.. That word moderator doesn't mean what it used to mean. We need to examine definition of moderation. It means to avoid extreme behaviors. Moderators used to provide community guidance. To be the adult in the room. This does not exist on social media. A pillar of old messageboards were people moderators. Someone who would step in when the users misbehave. When people start talking or behaving crazy. Sometimes it was better to just remove a thread all together. These kind of things are essential in solving the people problem.
There's no mod tool that does this. And don't nobody tell me we can throw AI at it. If social networks are to be human then it needs human guidance (aka human moderators). Can't just throw scripts at the problem.
Every account on ~~reddit~~ fediverse is a bot except you.
Jokes aside, I haven't noticed anything. I don't really see what would anyone gain by setting up bots posing as real humans. Especially on Fediverse. I'm not saying it's never happening but I don't think it's very common.
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I came here specifically to get away from the chatbot daycare hellhole that reddit became. Share some of your insights about these accounts and I'll tell you a little about why reddit got so bad. Fediverse doesn't really offer the same kind of incentive to somebody who's trying to train an LLM on comments but who knows.
On reddit, the biggest incentive for people to want to train LLM's is just the sheer amount of data there. Reddit is insanely big and the karma system is basically a "weight" value similar to how neural networks already categorize info. Even if somebody notices the obvious bot account, enough people there will still interact with the bot sincerely that it gets the interaction it's trying to provoke every time.
Also it's easy as hell to set one up to run on reddit. Simply verify an email address, subscribe to r/newtoreddit and and bunch of other subs that don't require karma to comment, and then only give votes for the first month before finally starting to leave comments. Reddit claims to screen for bot accounts but deviating from this specific pattern of conduct is something that gets new users comments flagged for review. Reddit is actually only screening real people.
If you want to talk real tinfoil hat shit, this is probably by design. Chatbots drive up traffic and interaction not just with eachother but specifically with the humans that will also severely inflate usage statistics to look good to advertisers. the ones who leave comments following common "redditisms" and patterns of discussion over and over and over and never get sick of saying the same things.
Basically, I'm hoping none of these conditions exist here. So far doesn't seem like it since fediverse isn't hiding ads as posts, blocking VPN users, or taking such a heavy handed involvement in moderation.
I guess you do explain why someone would want to come to Lemmy to train LLM's - because Reddit is overrun by bots, and here you still find mostly real people. Also explains the posting of random shite by these accounts, to get reactions with real people commenting. Sorry if I sound rather naive, it's because I am. I wasn't meant to exist in this timeline.
That is a possibility. Data from interacting with actual humans reduces the rate of model degradation. Maybe somebody does feel like they would get better results here. But they'd have to go to the trouble of sending requests to join instances and federate communities. It's not a whole lot of work but it's slightly more overhead for a website that gets way less hits than reddit as of now.
You're not naive dude, you're living in unprecedented times. It's sad to see people get jumpy at the idea that all of our interactions are becoming simulations of real ones but in some places it literally happened. I don't even fuck with instagram, facebook, or tiktok because I've seen the brainrot there that got created because the platform incentivised it. Stay curious and don't let the bastards grind you down👍
Not the vibe I’ve gotten. I do get that vibe over on Reddit. I think the quirky conversations and novel responses make me lean away from bot. However I’m not an expert.
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it seems such a stupid waste of my time and I’m afraid I might just end up blocking real people who happen to express themselves in a strange way
I definitely get accused of being a bot a lot, I'm just like this
Make website full of autists
Is everyone here a robot?
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Dead internet theory is not just a hypothesis anymore. It's an intentional business model. Enjoy what's left of online human interaction. Soon, it will all be just LLMs siloing each user individually.
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