1337tuxLemmy exceeds million users (maybe more accurately accounts)
DerWilliWonkaI wonder how people come up with the bot superstition? Just a feeling or is there any valid indication of massive influx of bot accounts?
Experience, mainly.
I used to run a phpbb forum, on average the bot signups outnumbered the real people 10 or 20 times. And that was with some fairly robust anti spam measures in place - something I think this platform is too new to have properly sorted out yet.
I may be wrong, I don't know how the back end here works, but any place where people can post publicly will be infested with bot signups very quickly. The only real variable is how good the anti spam measures are.
What is something someone can gain by swarming an instance or forums like yours with bots? I cant wrap my head around it. Also if someone has an instance and swarms it with bot accounts, it may seem like you got a popular instance but where is the revenue if there are noone who is able to click an ad? Do they do it just for the lols?
GizmoLionSpin up 50 bots.
Sign them all up for lemmy.
Let accounts interact/age.
Sell accounts to companies who want to advertise as one of the cool kids.
Happened on reddit nonstop.
Except that Lemmy doesn't show overall karma, so there's no use in doing any of that here.
TheDeadGuyAny conversation, be it political or commercial. All it takes is something sounding confident, a grain of truth and lots of upvotes to convince people.
That's why I like seeing downvoted as a red flag people can pay attention to
Pretty much why Reddit removed downvotes I think... brands got tired of users raining downvotes on them for shilling lol.
In my particular case (as was the case with most forums in the day), it was really just about spamming boards with links to whatever shitty ED pills or crypto scam they were trying to sell.
They were never really sophisticated, but never really had to be either. A spammer could spend a few minutes writing a script for a bot to crawl the web looking for phpbb signup pages, then try to create an account on any it could find and immediately post the links. They could post hundreds of links on dozens of different forums with just a few minutes work - and then do it all again tomorrow with a bunch of new signups.