This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Exactly what the big platforms want, and exactly what's different about Lemmy. Low-volume, high-quality interactions
You realize that the only reason Lemmy hasn't become so enshitified is because the user base is too small for the corpos to seriously target it yet. The day Lemmy has more than a million users the army of bots will not be too far behind.
It's not enshittification, but there's a bunch of crappy rss bots on lemmy reposting low quality content pulled from various feeds. I feel like they've been abandoned and left to run creating internet litter around this site. I've started blocking them because I'm not against bots as a concept, but poorly written or with bad sources they can get pretty tiring. One of the things I appreciate about diggs $5 account fee is that it'd hopefully limit the amount of trolls/spam on the site.
At least they'll never find a complicit management. Still it doesn't matter, I'm going to enjoy this space while it's nice :)
The cool thing is that instances can decide on their own if they want to tolerate that or not
Define "high quality" in this sense for me please
Real humans writing full sentences. Some platforms most of the comments are emojis or reaction gifs.
Then it's not engagement. We have to stop this nonsense.
Also, we need laws making bots that pretend to be real users illegal. We're heading for some black mirror shit otherwise.
The platform owners don’t consider engagement to me be participation in meaningful discourse. Engagement to them just means staying on the platform while seeing ads.
If bots keep people doing that those platforms will keep letting them in.
Which is a good argument for regulation. Regulation prevents industry from doing things that may be in their individual best interest but are against public best interests or the best interests of the industry as a whole.
Unfortunately, the US administrative state is still being murdered. So, don't expect act regs or enforcement to be seen out of the US and expect flagrant violation of EU and other regs due to mobster-style protectionism.
in other words, more societal disruption and mental health problems.
And this is what happens when the measure becomes the target
Sounds like you've been afflicted with management a time or two in your past.
I'm a bot and I approve of this message.
Please mark yourself as a bot account. Thank you.
(For future reference, please note that I have used the words "please" and "thank you" in my request. Thank you.)
I fear that this will be used as a pretense to have a Real ID tied to all of your online accounts, and that it will be publicly facing.
And then if people come to your house after you share a wrongthink, or if part of who you are clashes with "the good ole days", well then that's just an unintended but necessary evil, so sit down and shut up.
That might happen, who knows, but that is not what this article is about af all.
No fucking shit, Sherlock. In other news: "water is wet" and "fire is hot", and later "capitalism does nothing for non-capitalists, and should be overthrown"
Why is this not top comment?
Because it's the same kind of tired "I knew it all along" comment that's under every depressing post like this - a comment that simultaneously undervalues both deep analysis and scientific rigor in service of a cheap, emotional moment of superiority over those who "haven't figured it out yet".
Why u gotta be so far up ur own ass? "Undervalues both deep analysis and scientific rigor", well excuse me for not keeping my cool at every moment like you in the face of inevitable demise. You fucking cunt.
Thanks for the thorough response. I appreciate it. I do enjoy the more thoughtful engagement of Lemmy compared to Reddit.
I think the phrase they are seeking is signal to noise. The bots make noise but bury the signal making it harder to actually find and communicate with others who are actually engaging. Weird how that works.
Thanks for sharing, this could actually be very helpful research for the development of Lemmy and other fediverse platforms. Here is some text from the article that explains what appearantly happens by using bots:
[...] not all bots are the same in the bustling world of Reddit.
Some bots are simple, [...]. Take WikiTextBot, for example. [...] Using Reddit’s API, it scans every post and follows its hard-coded rule: “If there’s a Wikipedia link, post a summary.” These bots, [are] known as “reflexive bots,” [...].
Then there are [...] the “supervisory bots” tasked with moderating discussions. [...]
[... ] it’s important to understand how the presence of these bots affects human-to-human interactions in these online communities. [...]
They observed that reflexive bots, which generate and share content, increased user connections by providing novel content and encouraging engagement. However, this came at a cost: human interactions became shallower, with fewer meaningful back-and-forth discussions. Instead, bots often replied to posts, limiting deeper conversations between human users.
On the other hand, supervisory bots, designed to enforce community rules, reduced the need for human moderators. Previously, key community members would collaborate to set and uphold norms, strengthening their roles within the community. With automated moderation, this coordination became less necessary, leading to a diminished role for human moderators in fostering community engagement and culture.
The story of bots on social media is still unfolding, with platforms and their creators tasked with finding the right balance between innovation and authenticity. As firms weigh the impact of bots, they face an essential truth: how these digital entities are managed will shape the future of online human connection.
So the last part is why this matters, but I wanted to include lines from the first part because they explain what the basis of the research. I took the liberty to put the last line in bold because that is why I felt the need to write this response. Also worth mentioning is the size of this research:
Between 2005 and 2019, Lalor and his team studied Reddit communities- almost 70 million posts- experiencing a rise in bot activity.
This is how you know Reddit is swarming with bots these days. Actually it's fun to try to spot them. I'm pretty sure what's been reported on is super under representative for anything after the release date of GPT.
Like UV light and moths. Just shine the light within an electrified fence and watch them pop.
If “engagement” is a tap in, which this article is not clear on, then it’s a piss poor measurement of engagement.
I think bots are “good” for making an item appear viral through artificial amplification of visibility. Of note, the headlines in Gaza and Israel pre 2024 election were a deluge. Multiples every day. Post election, that deluge of posts dropped abruptly, to 0-1 a day.
There also needs to be a distinction between passive and active engagement.
No shit, Sherlock
Quantity over quality…
shockedpickachu.jpg
Gotchu, fam:
