Behavior analysis is definitely a popular way to handle this but it’s very difficult and resource intensive. Major issue is false positives as users are hard to predict in flexible environments like forums - is this person interested in all Honda posts as they are researching their new car purchase or they’re shilling for Honda?

It’s tough.

I’m certain lemmygrad is a propaganda operation by China or Russia. Well at least I want to believe that people aren’t that toxic and ignorant.

I think multiple accounts is a great idea.

I work in tech security and I cringe in pain when I see people post their 10 year accounts. The amount you can deduce and learn from mined social media data is absurd. I migrate to a new account every 6 months and that’s the longest you should keep an account. This of course doesn’t apply to your public brand account.

Because it’s impossible to block adblocking. The server can’t know whether the client plays the video. The best they could do is have you wait the ad-time even if the ad is blocked but that would just mess with their analytics - they want to be sure the ad is being watched.

The only reason adblock blocking works for smaller websites is because adblockers need to catch up with each implementation. People will easily catch up with Youtube as there are thousands of people working on Youtube programming.

It’s impossible to tell how much of the posts are bots but if you look at the default subreddits I’d say that it’s definitely noticable.

Reddit is a popular grey marketing area - be it shilling products or political propaganda. Lemmy/Federation hasn’t reached enough mass for this to be a real problem yet but it’ll happen eventually and Lemmy is an easy target right now. I used to work in bot detection area and modern, well made bots (the ones you should worry about) are essentially indisguishable from real users but script kiddies can be an issue too.

The only real way to fight bots is to reduce the incentive which is more of a cultural thing - people have to call out shills and a more transparent platform definitely helps.

Sorry for the rant but I think bots/spam will play a big role if federation ever reaches the point where there’s enough eye-balls for shilling to be valuable.

I think I’m happy with the outcome. People were always looking for an alternative to Reddit and all that was missing was critical mass. Now the alternatives are totally usable outside of small niches which will catch up eventually.

Reddit is definitely shitting its pants. They used to have zero direct competitors.

I think more realistic implication is that big chunk of reddit content is bots and propagandists.

Free API access to mod tools. The problem is that Reddit’s promises are useless and what - the admin volunteers have to pay for API until they do? Pay to moderate their website?

You can still do that, just pipe it through archive.is or just go there. You’re not giving Reddit much with your page view.

One thing to note that noticable amount of Reddit traffic is actually bots and they’re not taking time off. Be it legit bots or bots farming karma to peddle corporate ads later.

Closed source/centralized software always ends like this. It’s always “not my problem” with people when it comes to propriatory software dying until, of course, it is :(

Can you imagine the dumbasses at Reddit corporate thinking they could turn him into a villain? lol

The leadership is so incredibly dumb that it almost feels like sabotage.

I do wonder why we aren’t seeing any rolling screens on the market yet despite it looking like a more simple tech than the fold hinge. I hope we have something soon as that would be my preference too.

I think Apple is as bad as Microsoft or even worse. Their products are not even remotely as good as their fans claim to be either.

I had to use a macbook for work once and it honestly sucked and I really tried to like it even contributed to major user space programs through out my 2 year adventure. It’s a bad platform of blind leading the blind.

The further it goes the more it feels like this. It’s almost like conservatives don’t have a consistent philosophy about anything.

The article is a bit misleading. He wants to get rid of block for stronger mute as you can get around block by logging out.

The counter argument is that block is still useful because I block someone I want zero interaction with that person and people are too lazy to log out anyway so it kinda works in practice.

I’m not sure why is he stirring shit up. The block feature is on point with free speech philosophy he trying to push. If anything he should be making blocking etc. More powerful.

Honestly, many people are turned off by Lemmy tankies. I myself though I’d never come back to Lemmy until I found beehaw.

Reddit had so much community favor too. The whole awards thing was born from people wanting support the website. If they really struggle to make money could have rolled out an optional subscription or something with a message that everyone would have fallen for. The incompetence is incredible.