Asklemmy

All of r/WorldNews

Reddit is default "human advice" on what to buy, if you don't think it's crawling with companies bots as well

(but feely wise, it's sub dependent, no one will go to small sub to influence 10 people, conversely big subs are shaped both via allowed topics and first-to-post, first-to-downvote races)

Define "foreign"

Im not even sure how normal people post on reddit. Everytime ive ever tried to post on there in a community that isn't tiny my post is automatically removed and sent to "manual approval" which never actually happens. it baffles me how a website that is so hard to post on remains popular.

Voters? Probably 99%. Commenters though? Like actual bots and LLMs and stuff like that? Very few, 1% rounded up, I'd think. You're much more likely to encounter humans posing as unaffiliated random people as part of their job than LLMs doing the same.

There's a few other categories to consider.

Of small niche subs I've moderated, there's maybe a 10 to 1 or higher ratio of non-active users to active. Look at the highest voted posts of all time or the last year in a sub. If the sub as 10K subscribers, the highest number of votes on any post might be 1K or so. Maybe far less.

I saw on a couple of the sub's metrics that we would consistently gain 10-20 users a day, and maybe lose 1-3 subscribers daily. But with very little increased engagement. But so we would gain sometimes 500 or even 1000 users in a month, and nothing changes. Why? Always drove me crazy.

A lot of real people start up accounts and quickly abandon them. A lot of bots sub every subreddit and do stupid things like comment when you're comment is a haiku. Every script kiddie that ever coded a broken bot that never worked right might still have 4 or 5 axcounts out there as a dead subscribers.

And let's not forget the massive amount of people with multiple accounts (hi!) and the ones with sometimes severe mental health problems, wannabe trolls, and straight up Aholes trying to evade bans. There's likely more of these out there than actual malicious and active bots.

As for actual malicious bots posting, it's likely very few, and limited to engagement on larger subs to drop parts of a larger group of talking points. But the places that normally go for that kind of thing also don't mind hiring a bunch of Nigerian 419 scammers to be real humans posting from the bot accounts sometimes.

Wait? "Foreign bad actors"? You don't realize that the bad actors are domestic? Through the US government? Hence the whole "china bad" narrative.

For how much people on Lemmy who thinks "China bad" it's just as bad as reddit for domestic bad actors.

Who cares?

My guess: (pure speculation)

Lemmy (edit: I mean the comment section) is probably at 25% government agents or people acting on behalf of governments including US, Russia, China, possibly other allies of the aforementioned.

Bots tho, probably few, maybe 10% or less. Most of the instances use manual applications, so hard to get bots through. You'd need to write a different "essay" for each application, also think of unique names that doesnt look bot generated.

If you look specifically in (edit: the comments section of) political threads, probably anywhere from 25% to 50% government agents.

Mainsteam social media like Reddit, probably at 25% to 50% bots pre-exodus, now it seem like 50% to 75% bots, the percentage of government agents are probably much lower, since unlike Lemmy where there are much less users, on reddit they wouldn't have the manpower to post enough comments to manipulate the discussion, but they could just use bots instead, many of those bots are probably operated by governments. And on political subreddits, these numbers will skyrocket.

Thing thing about the internet, is you have to treat it as entertainment, not real source of unbiased information, especially not a forum where any rando can sign up.

I'm gonna restate what I said in another thread:

::: spoiler

I’ve come up with a system to categorize reality in different ways:

Category 1: Thoughts inside my brain formed by logics

Category 2: Things I can directly observe via vision, hearing, or other direct sensory input

Category 3: IRL Other people’s words, stories, anecdotes, in face to face conversations

Category 4: Acredited News Media, Television, Newspaper, Radio (Including Amateur Radio Conversations), Telephone, Telegrams, etc…

Category 5: The Internet

The higher the category number, means the more distant that information is, and therefore more suspicious I am.

I mean like, if a user on Reddit (or any internet fourm or social media for that matter) told me X is a valid treatment for X disease without like real evidence, I’m gonna laugh in their face (well not their face, since its a forum, but you get the idea). :::