I remember when we used to laugh and ignore people with these default-generated Reddit usernames... What a stupid community they've become. If you can't take the few seconds to create a username, you're not there for anything more than spamming bullshit.
this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2025
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ts a nearly year-old account, it started posting about a month ago, it made some innoculous posts, then pivoted to posting far-right misinformation in the r/northernireland subreddit.>
thats called warming up the account, and its designed to avoid the reddit ban evasion filters partially. it looks more legitimate if your "posting in a certain way", then the sudden switch to a propaganda path/spam is always the objective for these accounts. reddit has gotten too sensitive and are catching people that do this if they dont have any anti-detection methods employed.
Amusingly enough, brazen astroturfing (especially in political subs) was one of the main reasons I was looking for an alternative to Reddit and found Lemmy. Two years ago.
And it's certainly only gotten worse since.
Do people think there is a reason this won't happen to Lemmy eventually?
Well, first off it can't bhappen "to Lemmy" because Lemmy isn't va site - it's a piece of software.
It not only can and will but already has happened to individual instances. And they end up getting defederated by other instances and then either fix the problem or fade away.
And individual users can just move to other instances (or if they're smart, just stop using or even delete their account on the problem instance and keep using their other accounts on other instances).
And through it all, the rest of the fediverse just keeps chugging along.
Which illustrates the key difference between Lemmy/Mbin/Piefed/etc. and traditional social media - the fediverse is flexible. Individual instances can and will and do come and go, and it doesn't affect the fediverse as a whole.
It will definitely happen to lemmy, unless someone conceives an ingenious AI sieve beyond current human reckoning. But the bots haven’t yet come to our peaceful little commie Linux forum, and that’s something worth appreciating, in and of itself. Every day is a blessing.
As in I genuinely don't know if the fediverse tech helps with ai spamming - my assumption is even if it ever became a real threat to mainstream social media or big tech it would be flooded by ai bots anyways
Even with it being federated I don't see how Lemmy could be immune to astroturfing. I'm sure there's some already going on. Lemmy just isn't yet popular enough to be a major target. Instances can defederate from one another but it's trivial to create a new account on a different instance and resume turfing. I suppose the openness of Lemmy's logs, when compared to the closed-source centralized nature of reddit, could help suss out turfers though.
extreme versions political communities, instances are likely to get spammed, so reducing that would be defederating or blocking those instances. Lemmy will eventually have to come up with more anti-botting tools to combat this.
Sure there's individuals doing it already.
It only becomes a problem when a medium starts reaching a significant audience, then interventions are needed, like when Reddit boomed.
Then the US regime put their puppet there.
Same as they did with Facebook,etc...
With Lemmy being different I suppose they will have to find new ways or just massively use bots or paid trolls.
Same story. One year ago. That and stopping drinking are some of the best choices I've made in a long time.
I still use reddit occasionally for its smallest communities where I know I'm still interacting with humans. I assume the top posts are all bot posts with bots flaming bots in the comments. Everyone's time is worth more than that.
Bring back the enthusiast forums that were supported by calendar and sticker sales, we didn’t know how good we had it.
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SAME. I had been very sick and off social media during the whole exodus, so had no clue about the lemmyverse, but going back to reddit the astroturfing was sooo bad, I just had to look for alternatives.
Yes it takes very little searching to find this shit on reddit.
But - and I'll probably get tons of downvotes, but still: the Fediverse is not safe from this.
edit: considering our APIs are free & open it could even be easier, esp. if you don't want to leave a money trail
edit2: I definitely don't mean to diss the Fediverse in any way! It stands sky high against walled-in platforms. Just stay vigilant and real. This is not paradise.
It really isn't, even on my instance used by like... 3 or 4 actual people so far, I have had more than enough spam accounts - and those were relatively harmless. Support the server admins and mods of the servers you are on/communities you are in, if able, they are the ones who are engaged in cleaning up incursions like it. Oh, and report things.
For what it's worth, I do believe the Fediverse has higher resilience, thanks to a different culture, decentralised nature (with helpful platforms like Fediseer) and a lack of the "we just need numbers as big as possible for our investors to be satisfied"-incentive to tolerate anything that looks like engagement.
i tend not to report people on lemmy, because of bad experience with reporting people on reddit for misinformation/spamming,,etc. i mostly just block them.
Nothing can be prevented entirely online, but empowering users with the tools to choose their own experience and tailor their feed with the communities and users they choose themselves is a giant step in the right direction.
Reddit chose the path of consolidation and central control, and the results were inevitable.
Its easier to spot here, and since we're split up into small severs, its easier to moderate.
Its easier to spot here
It's super easy to spot on reddit. Even easier than that?
There clearly aren't that many bots (of all kinds, incl. humanoid) in the Lemmyverse (yet), so I guess they stand out more, but beyond that?
its easier to moderate
Hm. How so?
I learned early that admins (and possibly also mods) have more insight into user behavior, is that what you mean?
Beyond that the mod/admin structure is pretty much the same as on, say, reddit.
Everything is public, including votes.
Instance admins can notice if a lot of signups happen from a specific ip, email pattern or region.
Thank you for your patience.
Everything is public, including votes.
I have yet to figure out how that works. Does Lemmy offer a way to look at these things? Like who voted?
Instance admins can notice if a lot of signups happen from a specific ip, email pattern or region.
The same goes for, say, reddit admins.
lemvotes.org
Admins can see who voted on what, as can moderators.
Instance admins would be less stretched out than reddit ones, since people are split across instances.
Instance admins also have motivation to remove them, as bots make money for reddit.
bots use upvotes on reddit as a way to gain legitimacy to thier account so they can start spamming thier business posts.
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Yep. The astroturfing and hive mind made it easy to leave after the API debacle. Any modestly large sub pretty much made outside opinion not worth sharing. Smaller subs were still mostly ok, but even those were being overrun with reposts or people skirting the purpose of the sub trying to get karma. You couldn’t have discussions anymore, it was people posting for karma and people responding in ways to hop on karma coattails.
Agree. It's the nastiness that goes with it as well, if you have a different opinion you get smacked down for it. It's horrible.
I started to understand how screwed up Reddit was when I saw a front page post with like 70k upvotes on a video for a "fishing knot" that requires using both free ends of the line. Either 70k people didn't think about that for more than one second, or it's all bots. Tens of thousands of them.
bots, on a forum i go to , they buy hundreds if not thousands of accounts to do this.
People don’t think on social media. At least average normal people don’t.
I really think that a large percentage (far from a majority, tho) of what people see as new bot activity on social media is just a rise in “normies” using things like reddit.
Just look at all the people being fooled by ridiculous AI shit.
I wonder if one of these astroturfers would be interested in purchasing my now unused account that is still in the top 1℅ of highest karma users... 🤔
I'll take no less than $500,000. Don't lowball me. I know what I've got.
probably would get shadowban very quickly if it suddenly changes hands from inactivity, and it starts posting from atypical location, IP, or the behavior of the previous posting pattern was different. reddit currently is banning people quite easily, even if your acc isnt ban evading. high karma aged account seems to help agains tthat. but i read that accts created from the app and with google as the email seems to be preferred and slightly more resistant to the filters.
LOL. I wouldn't care. I'm not going to use Reddit again and I'd have money.
Got my very old one too, lots and lots of posts & interactions, if you find a buyer i'll give you 50% 😁
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How do you tell the difference between astroturfing and regular comments? I mean, besides "it's obvious".
When it's posts you agree with, it's honest users. When it's posts you disagree with, it's astroturfing.
I joke, but unfortunately that seems to be the most common metric for a lot of people. If it's a position "no one would really support" (in their view), then support for it must be astroturfed.
Bingpot! So many people live in meme bunkers, where every issue is a binary battle between moral perfection and diabolical evil.
Regular accounts will not have all their posts/comments nuked from a certain point in time, and they'll have comments in non-political subs mixed in.
I remember their being a lot of users saying it's "stealing" to block ads, especially on YouTube and you should definitely just sign up for premium.
No one would suspect anti-AI comments of being astroturf by authors and publishers - which means they could do so invisibly if they wanted to. I'm not saying they are, just that astroturfing seems like it would be easy to get away with if you pick the right forums.
Many comments all pushing the exact same sentiment.
If you know the engagement metrics for how much engagement a post needs to break into the algorithm and be recommended, you can spot them because all the astroturfed posts have x# of upvotes before real conversations start when it breaks into the mainstream
Wait. But posts on social media with a large number of comments with the same sentiment is SUPER common.
People comment without reading other comments ALL THE TIME. Just look at comments on youtube and instagram and similar sites that are not forums.
It’s actually really depressing to see, it makes you realize just how much people are not unique in their thoughts. Just how many people comment stating the obvious, almost like they are typing in metadata for the post. Or just how uncreative people are with jokes.
The problem is, unlike most people realize, astroturfing is rarely sourced from shill accounts like it used to be. Nor are high-karma accounts being purchased.
The issue is bots and shill accounts manipulate vote counts of posts/comments with certain positions. So, you don’t tell the difference, unless you find a way to track who is voting on Reddit content.
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only occasionally look at reddit and yeah the push is super obvious
the "hot" section for my vpn region the other day was just the top 4 pro-regime dumps
Accounts like this are usually taken over by right wing bots. Accounts that didnt care about politics, all of a sudden, have a huge agenda. Its just bullshit
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