Are bots basically scraping Reddit and reconstituting entire subs on Lemmy?
I said something about how it should be done a whole back, half jokingly.
I’m glad someone was serious.
I’ve been seeing some of that, but there are apparently also a ton of bots being created for who knows what reason and that’s spooky. (it made the user count jump up in hundreds of thousands) Can’t say I know much about that, but I’d imagine it’ll cause some issues sooner than later…
Election time. Same time bot activity gets extra crazy on Reddit. Prepare for shit-tons of propaganda.
I had to manage some auto registered bot accounts on my test instance. They didn’t do anything yet but it was pretty obvious they weren’t real. Randomly generated usernames and all created within a minute.
I wonder if it’s to age the accounts…
I can’t wait until we get bots that repeat catchphrases or tell you when your post contains all the letters of the alphabet! That was the best part of reddit!
I have a thing on my phone that lets me do a ¯_(ツ)_/¯ and for some reason lt loses an arm on Lemmy. Made me so sad to realize no bot is gonna answer that.
In programming backslash can sometimes be used to enter special characters. Maybe Lemmy also follows this syntax? If so, typing two consecutive backslashes might help.
Test with one backslash:
Test with two backslashes: \Isn’t that just markdown? Eg wrapping with a star/asterisk italicizes. If you want to escape that you backslash.
test in italics, made by wrapping with asterisks
* = a backslash escaped asterisk
Here: \ you lost this.
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On principle, I am downvoting any typical bot-response comments. Don’t do that here, not even “ironically”.
I miss stabbot, it was the best bot on Reddit.
I’ve now seen both sides, I just saw people on another thread complaining about how much they hated those bots and how glad they are that the bots are gone LOL
I personally am indifferent on them other than the remindme bot, that one was useful.
I can’t wait until we get bots that verge on gaining sentience, like good-ole u/bobby-b-bot
Half the fun of lotrmemes was the memes, the other half was the bots talking to each other. Some were predictable, but some were so well timed it was uncanny.
Google en passant
And my axe!
The other day, someone posted a thread about instances that had just started suddenly having tens of thousands of members. That was the first I saw on the topic.
I went to one of the first ones on the list (k6qw or something like that) and it was a brand new instance with no communities, one post with one response, and 20,000 members.
So it’s safe to assume they’re either bots or red lectroids (have to see if they’re all named John).
I bet my ass it’s a bot army being built by reddit admins to flood Lemmy and destroy it - taking down their competition.
That or election interference accounts for 2024.
