this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2023
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Asklemmy
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I really hope all the admins are able to keep repost bots down.
I doubt there will be much admins can do. A good repost bot can easily pose as a real person thanks to LLMs. Not to mention reddit had some of the best spam filters on the web and they couldn't stop it. Once lemmy becomes more popular, the bots will come.
I think reddit supported the repost bots as it drove up engagement and prevented people's feeds from getting 'stale.' They even admitted that in the beginning they would use fake accounts to post things and make the site seem more active than it really was.
As mentioned, users did create bots to detect not only repost bots but comment reposting bots as well. Reddit honestly has zero incentive to eliminate either of these.
Add a hard captcha in order to allow posting on specific communities that would be targets for bots, like c/memes. Like a very fucked up captcha.
https://youtu.be/WqnXp6Saa8Y
I mean "repost sleuth bot" caught repost bots constantly, and nothing was done.
Hopefully the smaller instance sizes will help, because it's not one 1admin per million users, but on small instances it's 1 per 1000. So someone suddenly posting a bunch gets caught real fast.
The only way to combat bots is with other bots - made by people who care about the problem. Program sniffers to detect repost bots and flag them, and other bots to ban them.
It will be a constant arms race to keep up with them, but it's either that or let them overrun everything.
It's also on the users to pay attention and when someone calls out a reporter to take it seriously, downvote and report them. The most annoying thing is the number of people who respond "who cares if it's a repost bot?" They don't understand that such bots left unchecked will consume everything, leaving nothing fresh behind, because that is their nature.