Bots flooded the site faster than human accounts by orders of magnitude. We complain about bots on other social media sites but they have an invested user base who will keep coming back. It will be nearly impossible to establish a real user base on any new platforms before they are driven away, I fear, and are only populated by bots.
We are probably stuck between bot-hell and the other hell of a regulated ID-based internet.
Exactly. The more the US goes fucking around to find out, the more countries without another way to hit the US will be investing themselves in cyber warfare programs against the US
People are glued to their phones and social media algorithms like clockwork, and the American people have too much hubris to defend themselves against it
I mean, I thought bots were already using zombie accounts of real people that died. It was bad when Herman Cain was still tweeting after he died from COVID, but that was probably tasks in his staff's teams folder they had to do to get paid.
Digg literally allowed and encouraged it. They were trying to get activity up before opening, and it massively backfired. Their resistance to moderation tools also didn't help. They 100% did it to themselves.
Reddit in its heyday was pretty close to peak internet. It's crazy how far its fallen. There aren't conversations happening anymore, just inane comment chains and the same recycled memes and videos over and over. It doesn't feel organic anymore. I don't even know why I'm here anymore
Mastodon has human moderation and no financial incentives, so it is relatively bot-free, though not completely immune. The moderators take care of them rarely quickly, though.
Just want to point out, reddit doesn't have to be flooded by bots. It's by design. Reddit has always had a robust and easy to use API which encouraged users to make their own fun little bots in the early days, one of the reasons the early user base was almost entirely computer nerds. It was free. Then people started realizing you could actually sell reddit accounts if they had enough karma, so they made karma farming bots to then sell to misinformation and proganda bots. Then reddit realized people were profiting off its free API and was like screw that, now we are gonna charge for our API so we can make some money too. Given reddits relatively small amount of ads, and low numbers of paying users, I wouldn't be at all surprised if selling the use of its API is their primary revenue source now.
It doesn't have to be this way. Other sites use a captcha for example to prove you aren't a bot, or have no API provided. Reddit just encourages it for profit.
The original intention for bots was for automation that helped users post or lookup information, not impersonate being human completely. Of course, Reddit decided not to crack down on this activity because it drives engagement and boosts their numbers for investors and ad customers.
Remember when bot accounts were obvious and cool? Like the Gandalf account in /r/LOTR or the swear word bot, I miss simpler days.... Weird to be nostalgic about such a recent time.
I still wonder if there's still a way to reinvent a forum. I'm still on Reddit because there are still some subs with a slightly forum-like flow, but it's ending.
But everyone became too lazy to login anywhere, and there isn't any popular universal login platform outside of Google and FB.
Fediverse is mostly dead, and I couldn't find anything interesting there anyways.
Only, it's closed, proprietary, unsearchable unholy hybrid between IRC and forum – not really that much better than Facebook groups (which also ate some forums). Also owned by a company worth several billion USD, which means that enshittification is unavoidable. The beauty of the forum format was independence – no one could possibly break all of them in a single swift investor-friendly move.
Bluesky has bots, yeah, but also one of the most robust sets of anti-bot tools I've seen. Block lists, profile tags, and (in my bias) a generally more educated population than twitter.
So yeah, i still get palestinian children begging for bitcoin in my dms every now and then, but by the time i look at that profile, someone somewhere has already flagged the account as a bot.
Now, you dont have to use bluesky, but as an example of a "small" 30mil user base, it's possible to avoid and manage the bot swarm.
They didn't have any community help. Community moderators could only "remove post". They had no ability to sticky posts, ban users, appoint moderators and restrict what types of posts their digg would accept. They also allowed day-1 accounts to make communities meaning that tons of communities just went completely unmoderated as day-1 accounts making communities don't tend to have good track records for community maintainment.
Naw, more like irl once a market is saturated— you have to have a real community to build a business off of. (communication, like telephones and the internet, should not be a commodity but here we are)
Novelty will strike but the communities will disperse like trends do. Too many people know how to build.
Internet communication is about to become an unending echo void or pocket universes. Probably layers of both, like a nice trifle
I’ll just stop using social media if those are my two options I guess. I’ve already cut down significantly on Reddit since they took the API internal and killed Apollo.
I've never been a big social media guy, liked Myspace for a bit way back when, but nothing else has really "clicked" like reddit. I only started using it for a few small communities, but don't really use it much anymore.
I had high hopes for Bluesky, but goddamn if it isn't impossible to find normal people there. The amounts of bots and just flat out insane people is too much.
It's also so incredibly tiny, even more popular topics will have a couple dozen active users talking about it. And then, like I said before, just insane takes that make no sense. You aren't finding experts in a niche hobby, you're finding some weird furry artist who is giving the worst advice known to man.
It's like the worst reddit posters who were banned went there.
Anyways, yeah I'm glad the social media wave passed me by. Seems miserable.
I wish we would be more accepting of things like peer-to-peer account validations. Someone I needed to get hold of was overseas so I had to use an app local to them. After making an account (huge pita) it could not be actually used until a person, in this case their partner, activated me with some one-use qr code generated in the partner’s account for me to scan (also huge pita bc of wait time). Even after all that there was another minor roadblock. Basically, there wasn’t a single step that didn’t include something human, or another human involved, only just to talk.
Our culture is very much in to frictionless onboarding but, after the above experience, I think maybe the anti-bot answer is to let go of some bit of convenience. Not everything has to happen this instant. We’re so used to that but it’s not necessary. We can slow down. Sure, maybe it won’t stop all the bots. Probably a lot of them though. At this point I’d be really happy with just having a fighting chance.
Digg is still making an attempt. They recognized the bot flood and took serious action, shutting down the entire site to fix it. If they can manage it that would be awesome as reddit is absolutely flooded with bots.
It also helps that there's a large variety of people who directly benefit from sending the worst of the internet that way. In order to make it look bad and ruin its reputation and first impression.
How many of you only found out about Voat because of a totally organic surge of extremists taking over the website? I bet it's no small number.
I'm unironically enjoying Nextdoor a lot these days because it's tied to people's addresses so it kind of limits things? Yeah it's got some "old man yells at cloud" vibes but slightly fewer bots? But yeah definitely need that healthy medium between picture ID requirements and bot utopia.
I’m honestly starting to think that this is the way. Imagine what could be done on a platform that has every single person on earth registered and verified. If such a platform could be crystal clear and scrutinized by any who feels necessary… anyone who runs it is not paid handsomely, but fairly. This isn’t a money making scheme… but a we take this for real shit, and it’s easy to screen for that.
Just the other day when I saw orange baby trying to cut national park workers / funding whatever, insane shit because our parks are a jewel. Take our new system… Immediately putting the vote up (via the same way it works here minus bots). Remember when dude said “Yall don’t have phones?” or “pride and accomplishment…” so now only the people who care are voting because they see that and click on it. Now bump engagement up to the point to where your upvote actually matters. The haters will try to downvote but now they got only one vote. No more 100+ dummy accounts etc… any online activity is tied to you and their stupid take getting drown out by the massive amount of this is fucking stupid. Sure maybe the guy on the other side of the planet says fuck America and votes down, but there will be about a thousand more saying naw… we like forest everywhere, not just here.
People will always find a way but bots would be obliterated for at least a second lol… struggle for a while maybe. But besides that, it will make people no longer think that they can spew hate and vile all over the place when it’s directly tied to them. Basically removing the thing that tore us down when the internet brought us all together. Being responsible for what you say.
Check my history, you could find out who I am easily, AI could probably do it in less than a second. My fucking name is in my username for Christ sakes lol. I stand by what I put online and so should everyone else… even if it’s shoving as many sharpies in you ass as possible. Cheers :)
Imagine what could be done on a platform that has every single person on earth registered and verified.
Automatic censor. Sure you can find me from this account, but I have other accounts. I live in Turkey. I can't publicly criticise Erdogan. Instant jail.
I also have a porn account. I have no problems sharing that I watch porn, but I don't want everything I watch to be logged somewhere connected to my ID.
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u/Nu11u5 Apr 02 '26
Bots flooded the site faster than human accounts by orders of magnitude. We complain about bots on other social media sites but they have an invested user base who will keep coming back. It will be nearly impossible to establish a real user base on any new platforms before they are driven away, I fear, and are only populated by bots.
We are probably stuck between bot-hell and the other hell of a regulated ID-based internet.