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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 29th, 2023

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  • I hope you are right about better mechanisms to detect and control Astroturfing. It is what killed Reddit for me, not the whole API mess.

    If you want a Reddit example, go look at the “Naked and Afraid” subreddit dedicated to the show. Almost all the activity is from accounts with the same semantic naming pattern and who have the same account pattern in terms of age and ratio of karma.

    When you look at what is being posted, it is obvious that Discovery/Max paid some shitty social-media marketing company to “increase engagement”. They will post for a thing, against a thing, opened ended questions, etc. then all the other fake accounts pile in and respond. Creating comment chains 8-12 deep with fake comments to try and keep you “engaged” with their content.

    The same thing will happen here. The Astroturfers don’t care about community standards, rules, “shame”, or accounts. They create and burn accounts by the hundreds of thousands. They also make money in this, so they will just continue to optimize for any criteria the fediverse uses to move content to “hot” visibility.

    I haven’t seen a platform yet that has a good way to combat this.


  • It’s already started. There was a technology post earlier that included an affiliate link to a big online retailer.

    It won’t be long before Disney astroturfs the entertainment communities and car companies astroturf the tech communities. There is no way to prevent it without requiring a level of privacy invasion that most people would not welcome.

    The fediverse is just as susceptible to this as every other platform. Now that Lemmy is counting users in the millions, the enshitifcation will begin. I just hope the communities figure out some novel way to mitigate it.