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this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2023
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I studied bot patterns on Reddit for a few years while using the site and was active in their takedown. My username is the same on there if you want to see the history of my involvement. What drove me to stop being so involved in bot takedowns is the extent to which Reddit as a site was continually redesigned to favor bots. In fact, I woke up today to a 3 day suspension for reporting a spam bot as a spam bot. I think what we need to examine in these cases, if possible, is if the bots were made strictly for the purpose of contesting blackouts (i.e. by Reddit themselves) or if they were made by a hobbyist or spammer. Given that these are on r/programming, that makes it seem more likely that a hobbyist programmer made these bots for a laugh or something, rather than it being an inside job. If the usual resources of Reddit’s API were accessible enough to provide a total history of these bot accounts’ posts and comments, then that would help to clarify (this is what I mean about Reddit redesigns favoring bots). On the subject, I think Lemmy needs to start implementing preemptive anti-bot features while it is in an embryonic stage of becoming a large social media site (or a pseudo-social media site like Reddit) to future-proof its development
What kind of bot detection features should Lemmy add in your opinion?
I’m very new to this site so I’m not sure what all already exists. Some features that come to mind based on my experience on Reddit and other sites:
As someone who had my 16+ year old account on Reddit permabanned for writing antibot scripts trying to keep the community I modded free from scammer and spammers, this is spot on.
Super useful. I hope these suggestions wil land eventually on the GitHub page.