While browsing the fediverse I come across more and more accounts that seem … a bit off, a little uncanny. The stuff they post seems random, their comments slightly weird. What’s going on, is the fediverse being overrun by bots? Or am I as a fanatic anti-AI person just losing my mind and seeing the enemy everywhere?
I hate the fact that I now question every interaction that seems a bit off - 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 - as a neurodivergent person I know how bad I would feel about being ostracized as ‘too strange to be real’. How would you handle this?
You must log in or # to comment.
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.
Ray Bradbury is great. I remember convincing the teacher to do a lesson on there will come soft rains back in the day.
People on here are not subject to algorithms. There is no algorithmic manipulation to some sort of hive mind. Oh. And some use LLMs to translate their posts.
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
Same lol, the only time I think about bots on lemmy is people accusing me if being one
Make website full of autists
Is everyone here a robot?
I think we’re too small a population for any nefarious motivated interests yet.
doubt. any community with 1000 active users is prime for manipulation.
Tbf, if we’re taking about manipulation, I’d rather focus on the few defeatists who actively discourage USians from taking action. I find that way more sus.
or the folks who still defend their stance on “Democrats support genocide” as an excuse for not voting or voting third party.
like yeah, we get it. they aren’t much better in that regard, but…maybe we wouldn’t have needless tariff wars, or verbal attacks on our closest allies, or ICE kidnapping American citizens, or American citizens being shipped to prisons in other countries, or concentration camps in America, or…had we voted for Harris and let Trump win(don’t even get me started on that bullshit).
If it reassures you, I personally haven’t perceived too much bot activity here, at least not compared to Reddit. Either they’re much stealthier here, or they’re not here in much force.
Something I’ve seen on Reddit several times now, but not here, is obvious bot vote manipulation. I.e. you would go to, for example, a subreddit of a niche music artist, a newish account will make a post linking to some really obvious scam merchandise site for that artist, it would be replied to by several collaborating new bot accounts expressing desire for said merchandise and they’d all be upvoted, and regular users calling out the scam or bot activity get massively downvoted. Eventually it gets deleted by a human moderator. Not seen anything like that here.
I’d imagine Lemmy is less vulnerable since it’s small, bot makers will gain more for targeting bigger sites like Reddit, and I hope if it got bigger here the decentralised setup would give ways to defend against it, like defederating instances (temporarily if appropriate) that have been compromised by a lot of bots.
I think the trap is that you should look for accounts that seem extra normal. Those are your typical bot accounts. Impeccable spelling, and more elaborate structure than you’d typically find in a social media comment, but very “locally plausible” content.
In my experience accounts that seem weird are run by weird humans.
Oh, wait, all I do is quote Terry Pratchett and occasionally shitpost
I’m probably not a bot
You’re not imagining things — the fediverse is seeing more bots and AI-generated accounts, and it’s natural to feel unsettled by interactions that feel uncanny. At the same time, your sensitivity to misjudging real people — especially those who express themselves differently — is valid and important. The best you can do is set gentle boundaries: mute or scroll past what feels off, stay open to the strange-but-human, and accept that some ambiguity is inevitable. You don’t have to solve the mystery of every account — just protect your peace.
Is this ai generated because I see em dashes
Yes. I kept the em dashes in as a clue. I did ask for a more concise answer without bullet points.
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.
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👍
Fediverse mods and admins don’t want to cancel bots because lemmy’s engagement is so shit they want every possible source of content active
It’s a deliberate choice of quantity over quality and no amount of reporting or complaining will change that
Reddit took almost a decade to become a bot hotspot, it took lemmy less than 18 months
cool story bro
I’ve noticed a lot of weird comments taking extremely obvious jokes entirely literally but as the others have said there’s an abundance of autists here so it’s hard to say.
Im probably guilty of writing a lot of those tbh. Its always a toss up if I get a joke, think I get a joke but get it completely wrong, dont get a joke, or dont even realize something is a joke.
We’re here because we’re like that.
been that way since I joined.
it’s crazy how I can call someone out in a low traffic community and end up with 30 downvotes in five minutes.
it’s also funny how when you call different people out on similar topics you get the same word-for-word response back from weeks or months ago.
I’m not saying it’s bots, but…
Tbf, I’ve caught myself repeating the same opinion from a while ago on accident. I’m a person of habit, what can I say?
same opinion is one thing, but when two different people give verbatim the same bullet points it’s a bit obvious.
tbh just with how the fediverse works I would not trust vote counts here whatsoever. The downside of having no central authority over the network is that anything that lets one instance affect the whole network, like votes from bots on one instance being federated, cant be entirely trusted.
And like with “Who’s line is it Anyway” everything is made up and the points don’t matter.
They are magical internet points and getting thin skinned over downvotes is pathetic 😂
couldn’t care less for the downvotes tbh, if anything I’ll wear them as a badge of honor.
my problem is getting 30 downvotes in five minutes in a sub that has maybe five active users at any given hour of the day.
Interesting how many people here get hung up on downvotes and advise to either block the techies, the tankies, or both. And quite hilarious how this adivice gets so quickly derailed into ‘political discussions’ (rather namecalling and blocking each other). I wasn’t even talking about downvotes, I don’t care much about them, and I try to not get involved in political stuff where people consider it a useful way to discuss about any issue, because that’s just kindergarden stuff and I’d expect a bot to be able to be a little more convincing than just downvoting my post or comment. Yet another reason to spend more time offline - I’mma switch all of you off! And you! And you!!
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
As an AI language model, I’m unable to address your concerns.
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!
