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It's quite sad to see everything related to the blackout on /r/programming wiped.
(lemmy.brendan.ie)
this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2023
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Programming
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We must prevent these kinds of bots on getting a foothold here.
I acknowledge that we do have bots here [lemmy], reposting top posts from reddit. As we grow in number. We must also scale down these bots until the day that only moderating related bots are existing in our ecosystem.
What’s the point of those bots? There’s no karma to farm on Lemmy.
What is the point in farming karma at all?
You can sell high karma accounts to spammers.
Spammers don't want high karma accounts, they want higher valued accounts. Karma is just one (very easy to gain and view) indication of value. The lack of karma does not mean that spammers wont want to buy accounts on the Lemmy, just that the metrics they used to judge a valuable account are different and less transparent.
The accounts with high karma end up getting sold to businesses that want to use them to advertise (but make it look like grass roots support).
They want high valued accounts, karma is just one measure of that. Removing the karma from accounts does not remove the value of those accounts. Just changes what metrics are used to judge value. So there is still an incentive to create bots that try to create valued accounts even if those accounts are not actually creating valued content. The only question is what will businesses see as a valued account.
Though I do think removing karma is a positive as it forcing them to work a bit harder.
As i argued in another comment, there are many useful bots for certain niche communities that I really think have a place here, even though I am generally wary of AI accounts infesting the fediverse as well.
Good examples for good and very useful, yet not mod work related bots are on TCG/CCG subs like magic the gathering and hearthstone to provide context to card names, or convert deck codes into a nicely formatted table of the used cards. Or on the Lego sub, returning any set number as a link to the proper bricklink entry. This kind of bot should be allowed and even encouraged to be used where appropriate.
Then there are the plenty of irrelevant and annoying bots we really can do without, like the alphabetical order bot, haiku bot, the dozens of bots quoting LOTR or Star Wars characters, and so on. Like most reddit jokes they stopped being funny fairly quickly and now add nothing to the conversation, but are being kept around for karma.
And then there are the more insidious bots that are about to become widespread, being harder to detect the more their refinement advances. It is going to be a constant arms race between bot detection and bot deception skills.
There are some bots that are useful for everyone (community specific ones mostly), those I have no qualms with as they help everyone in that community.
The ones I abhor are the spam bots ones, different accounts giving variations of the same messages, possibly to farm karma or inflate activity numbers (I wouldn't rule anything out when it comes to spez making his darling look active).
I also hate down vote bots as I feel they don't contribute to anything.
Yes, thank you for that. I guess I used the wrong term, I should have said "Service Bots" those bots who provide useful service for the community.
and yes, entertainment and joke bots are tiring. (they can exist but, can we apply a limit on their frequency? let's say an entertainment bot can only post a maximum of 5 posts per week for a small instance and 50 posts per week for a significantly larger instance. That way it would still remain novel and it's like a lottery where people are looking forward to its next appearance.
this is the hardest part, as the bot farms typically have the advantage of first strike. If we are not careful, we would be left behind as being on defense puts us in the position of being a reactionary player in this game of whack-a-bot.
There already is some ChatGPT bot and I see people bringing it into threads sometimes. I downvote almost every person who does so, as I've yet to see a single case where it was actually asked for or meaningfully contributed.
I want more communities to have rules against unsolicited AI comments and for them to better enforce them (one of the cases I'm referring to was in a community that already had a rule against AI comments, but the comment had still been up for a while and had been upvoted).