Technology
This is the official technology community of Lemmy.ml for all news related to creation and use of technology, and to facilitate civil, meaningful discussion around it.
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When Reddit protests were at its height, posts to the site dropped by only 20%. Who is doing the majority of the posting?
I am sure some of it is spam bots. But also - a big value of Reddit is indeed in the long tail of niche communities. Many did not join the protest.
Using bots to replace users-lost-to-protest has always been the goal. All that matters is that the numbers go up.
This is good for the sale (IPO).
Twitter had the same plan--keep counting bots. Elon (or some advisor on his team), rightfully argued this point and eventually it lead to a lawsuit, that was then settled out of court.
Google and facebook have been selling "ad impressions" of questionable human-ness for decades. None of these sites have any real incentive to find out how many bots are on their platform.
Bots mostly. Take a look at the site, you'll notice many usernames consisting of a random adjective or noun in front of a random noun and a random number at the back. Sometimes they are in camel case, sometimes they are separated by dashes or underscores.
Go to the profiles of those. Bot accounts display that they are 6-12 months old and have no activity for the first few months. The activity starts with out-of-place comments on reposts made by other users (they never comment on OC), so they are likely copied from other users that commented below the original post.
After the initial commenting phase, they start posting. It's never OC, just reposts and they never reply to questions in the comments.
At this point I'm convinced those bots are deployed by reddit themselves because they are so easy to spot and no action is taken against them.
Then there's also the porn bots which collect properly tagged material from other sites and post it to the corresponding subreddits. You can spot them by looking at their profiles, they post 20-30 images an hour without pause. I'm pretty sure those are made by users, we'll see once the API changes go live.
Edit: Typos
That's the format of the usernames that Reddit suggests. That doesn't really mean much.
Yes, that's why you need to check the profiles and look for the criteria I listed.
I remember just one time where I falsely accused someone to be a bot based on that and I've done it about a hundred times.
It always struck me as odd that so many users on Reddit were using the default generation scheme. No other site I've been on has so few people caring about the name they pick
TIL this has a name. love it
There are all kinds of useful named things to learn about.
https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/snake-case-vs-camel-case-vs-pascal-case-vs-kebab-case-whats-the-difference/
Oh, wow. It's so cool when you been using these patterns for years and suddenly realize they have a name! Thanks a bunch.
Thanks, so cool. TIL I habitually use snake case for filenames and kebab case for screen names and urls. Never even thought about it.
Names cannot have spaces in programming, so there's all sorts of well known and discussed schemes like camel, kebab, snake etc.
A lot of people simply don't give a shit. Look at the amount of people still on Facebook.
I'm only on Facebook for local town news 😭
Events for me. Can't get away from it.