There is definitely money to be made. Whether it is shilling for a product or even attempting to inflate market share in the hopes of converting said market share into either donations or outright selling to investors.
Yeah, I don’t think they have figured out how to properly manipulate lemmy yet (I have seen a shocking amount of facebook “why don’t these kinds of posts go viral” levels of nonsense, for example). But bots are cheap and to pretend that there is not an active effort to figure out how to manipulate us is naivety, at best.
Maybe it is just that I am an old. I watched reddit fall. Hell, I watched fucking gamefaqs “fall”. Not to mention usenet and the rest. Because the reality is that where there are people, there is money. And modern day advertisement techniques (whether it is AI bots or just people in a warehouse in the global south) are increasingly cheap.
If Lemmy had the numbers Reddit does, we’d have more bots. I expect our admins are more responsive and more willing to take risks (like banning legit users when they’re a false positive for a bot). But the APIs available also make bots easier.
The longer term solution is probably a paid instance and/or identify verification. A one-time fee of $5-15 would significantly hinder bots and help the fediverse to be sustainable. It means bans stick much better, and slows cheap bots from having infinite attempts to achieve indistinguishably.
Identity verification comes with its own problems, but they may be workable. People don’t want to post under their real names, but that information doesn’t need to be revealed. It could be possible to have regional instances that verify and publish only your general location, such as state or county.
There is definitely money to be made. Whether it is shilling for a product or even attempting to inflate market share in the hopes of converting said market share into either donations or outright selling to investors.
Yeah, I don’t think they have figured out how to properly manipulate lemmy yet (I have seen a shocking amount of facebook “why don’t these kinds of posts go viral” levels of nonsense, for example). But bots are cheap and to pretend that there is not an active effort to figure out how to manipulate us is naivety, at best.
Maybe it is just that I am an old. I watched reddit fall. Hell, I watched fucking gamefaqs “fall”. Not to mention usenet and the rest. Because the reality is that where there are people, there is money. And modern day advertisement techniques (whether it is AI bots or just people in a warehouse in the global south) are increasingly cheap.
Well, not literally no money to be made but compared to reddit, I meant. But you’re absolutely right.
If Lemmy had the numbers Reddit does, we’d have more bots. I expect our admins are more responsive and more willing to take risks (like banning legit users when they’re a false positive for a bot). But the APIs available also make bots easier.
The longer term solution is probably a paid instance and/or identify verification. A one-time fee of $5-15 would significantly hinder bots and help the fediverse to be sustainable. It means bans stick much better, and slows cheap bots from having infinite attempts to achieve indistinguishably.
Identity verification comes with its own problems, but they may be workable. People don’t want to post under their real names, but that information doesn’t need to be revealed. It could be possible to have regional instances that verify and publish only your general location, such as state or county.