Behavior analysis is definitely a popular way to handle this but it's very difficult and resource intensive. Major issue is false positives as users are hard to predict in flexible environments like forums - is this person interested in all Honda posts as they are researching their new car purchase or they're shilling for Honda?
It's tough.
I'm certain lemmygrad is a propaganda operation by China or Russia. Well at least I want to believe that people aren't that toxic and ignorant willingly.
I think multiple accounts is a great idea.
I work in tech security and I cringe in pain when I see people post their 10 year accounts. The amount you can deduce and learn from mined social media data is absurd. I migrate to a new account every 6 months and that's the longest you should keep an account. This of course doesn't apply to your public brand account.
Because it's impossible to block adblocking. The server can't know whether the client plays the video. The best they could do is have you wait the ad-time even if the ad is blocked but that would just mess with their analytics - they want to be sure the ad is being watched.
The only reason adblock blocking works for smaller websites is because adblockers need to catch up with each implementation. People will easily catch up with Youtube as there are thousands of people working on Youtube programming.
It's impossible to tell how much of the posts are bots but if you look at the default subreddits I'd say that it's definitely noticable.
Reddit is a popular grey marketing area - be it shilling products or political propaganda. Lemmy/Federation hasn't reached enough mass for this to be a real problem yet but it'll happen eventually and Lemmy is an easy target right now. I used to work in bot detection area and modern, well made bots (the ones you should worry about) are essentially indisguishable from real users but script kiddies can be an issue too.
The only real way to fight bots is to reduce the incentive which is more of a cultural thing - people have to call out shills and a more transparent platform definitely helps.
Sorry for the rant but I think bots/spam will play a big role if federation ever reaches the point where there's enough eye-balls for shilling to be valuable.
I think I'm happy with the outcome. People were always looking for an alternative to Reddit and all that was missing was critical mass. Now the alternatives are totally usable outside of small niches which will catch up eventually.
Reddit is definitely shitting its pants. They used to have zero direct competitors.
I think a more realistic implication is that big chunk of reddit content is bots and propagandists.
Free API access to mod tools. The problem is that Reddit's promises are useless and what - the admin volunteers have to pay for API until they do? Pay to moderate their website?
You can still do that, just pipe it through archive.is or just go there. You're not giving Reddit much with your page view.
One thing to note that noticable amount of Reddit traffic is actually bots and they're not taking time off. Be it legit bots or bots farming karma to peddle corporate ads later.
Closed source/centralized software always ends like this. It's always "not my problem" with people when it comes to propriatory software dying until, of course, it is :(
The clever check is impossible. The server can't know the client is showing the video even when playing DRM content. I could literally mute the sound and put a black box over the ad until it's over. The problem is as old as the internet itself.
That's why Apple and Meta pushing eye tracking so hard. It's the only solution to the ad blocking problem.
I think YT is doing well with YT premium and that's the way to go for them. It's one of my favorite subscriptions and I'd probably stick around even if they raise the price unless they hurt the creators so badly they bounce and I'd bounce with them.