Lemmy has multiplied it’s number of users (maybe more accurately accounts) in just few days. How much do you think is the percentage of bot accounts? Is Lemmy having problem with bot farming?

  • TheAngryBad@kbin.social
    1·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • DerWilliWonka@kbin.social
      0·
      1 year ago

      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?

      • GizmoLion@kbin.social
        4·
        1 year ago

        Spin 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.

        • TheDeadGuy@kbin.social
          2·
          1 year ago

          Any 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

      • fu@libranet.de
        2·
        1 year ago

        @DerWilliWonka @1337tux @TheAngryBad there are cetainly some who do it for the lulz, and there are some who probably do it as a way to encourage others to make security changes to the platform. Personally, I think it would be more useful to file issues via git, but what do I know, I’m just an old-timer who quit college after failing security class, and thereby losing my scholarship.