Signup safeguards will never be enough because the people who create these accounts have demonstrated that they are more than willing to do that dirty work themselves.
Letâs look at the anatomy of the average Reddit bot account:
Rapid points acquisition. These are usually new accounts, but it doesnât have to be. These posts and comments are often done manually by the seller if the account is being sold at a significant premium.
A sudden shift in contribution style, usually preceded by a gap in activity. The account has now been fully matured to the desired amount of points, and is pending sale or set aside to be âagedâ. If the seller hasnât loaded on any points, the account is much cheaper but the activity gap still exists.
When the end buyer receives the account, they probably wonât be posting anything related to what the seller was originally involved in as they set about their own mission unless theyâre extremely invested in the account. It becomes much easier to stay active in old forums if the account is now AI-controlled, but the account suddenly ceases making image contributions and mostly sticks to comments instead. Either way, the new account owner is probably accumulating much less points than the account was before.
A buyer may attempt to hide this obvious shift in contribution style by deleting all the activity before the account came into their possession, but now they have months of inactivity leading up to the beginning of the accounts contributions and thousands of points unaccounted for.
Limited forum diversity. Fortunately, platforms like this have a major advantage over platforms like Facebook and Twitter because propaganda bots there can post on their own pages and gain exposure with hashtags without having to interact with other users or separate forums. On Lemmy, programming an effective bot means that it has to interact with a separate forum to achieve meaningful outreach, and these forums probably have to be manually programmed in. When a bot has one sole objective with a specific topic in mind, it makes great and telling use of a very narrow swath of forums. This makes Platforms like Reddit and Lemmy less preferred for automated propaganda bot activity, and more preferred for OnlyFans sellers, undercover small business advertisers, and scammers who do most of the legwork of posting and commenting themselves.
My solution? Implement a weighted visual timeline for a userâs points and posts to make it easier for admins to single out accounts that have already been found to be acting suspiciously. There are other types of malicious accounts that can be troublesome such as self-run engagement farms which express consistent front page contributions featuring their own political or whatever lean, but the type first described is a major player in Redditâs current shitshow and is much easier to identify.
Most important is moderator and admin willingness to act. Many subreddit moderators on Reddit already know their subreddit has a bot problem but choose to do nothing because it drives traffic. Others are just burnt out and rarely even lift a finger to answer modmail, doing the bare minimum to keep their subreddit from being banned.
Iâd love to experience the Mass Effect trilogy for the first time again. Especially since I started with 3 so I already knew the ending when I went back to the other games.
OK, I know nothing about furry social interactions, but non-furry cons - comic, scifi, etc., are all generally quite welcoming.
The best advice I got as an introvert who moved to a different country was that I donât have to be outgoing, I just have to pretend to be outgoing. Acting, essentially. It was surprising how easy it was to fake sociability, to the point that I made a few friends.
I know a large portion of them genuinely donât believe in the science or what have you, but a majority of them simply donât give a fuck, because theyâve been promised a golden mansion and all of their loved ones healthy and happy. And all they have to do is stay meek and easily forgive all transgressions until they die. Then theyâre free!
I can follow and see content from both accounts via the Ice Cubes app.
EDIT: I just realized you canât see the posts in your timeline. I can only see as far as 2 days ago via my app, so unless youâre able to post an image more recent I canât help out. Sorry!
Remember that the idiots in the 19th & 20th centuries uncovering all kinds of Egyptian stuff purposefully damaged inscriptions and art because they prominently showed gasp penises!
Exec 1: Should we do research into what gamers want to play?
Exec 2: Nah, just smush together whatever everybody else is doing, slap on a new coat of paint, and then ship that shit. The idiots will eat it up and weâll be rich.
Gamers: Who asked for this? I didnât ask for this. I donât want to play this shit. Iâve got better shit that I can play for free.
There have definitely been times that copying other people worked out well.
Fortnite and Apex copied the BR trend when PUBG wasnât satisfying everyoneâs needs. The former even lazily reskinned a zombie defense game for the battle royale approach. Lots of games reskin the theme of Dark Souls and do okay.
Even if itâs lazy or uninventive, once in a while one of those reskins has a particular element of the concept it reinvents in a much better way. Seems Concord never came up with any such ideas, which could have been great since many people are currently tired of Overwatch specifically.
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