this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2026
26 points (90.6% liked)

Asklemmy

54768 readers
195 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

  1. Open-ended question
  2. Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
  3. Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
  4. Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
  5. An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 7 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Hola all!

Joined lem a week ago. So far I’m really happy that this is a slow community. It’s not hyper-consumer news and I don’t get to see 500 new posts about people punching each other or what trump did like 10 minutes ago.

Just wondering from some of the comments, some people either feel like really drone minded or having a hard time to accept the sun is blue, just because.

Makes me wonder some of them are actually bots. Not saying this as in derogatory way. Compared to Reddit, how is the bot situation on lemmy? How often the data is being scraped off and used to manipulate people here?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] Tippy@sh.itjust.works 4 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (3 children)

I have to disagree with many of the comments in this thread saying there are no / minimal bots here. I started tagging users pretty frequently instead of blocking over a year ago, and it's pretty eye opening to see those accounts pop up in the wild posting completely opposing content or opinions from week to week. Sometimes even from thread to thread. Especially when it comes to politics or AI, for example. It doesn't help that ban evading and making alts is dead simple.

Of course, this is just my opinion based on my own experiment and observations. I've been convinced many times I was arguing with some fash chud only to then see them completely agreeing with my position in another thread two days later. Normal people don't flip flop that easily. I think LLM controlled bots are a totally different beast than what many of us are used to, and its much harder to see past the facade in the moment.

If your fedi client has a tagging feature, you might be surprised what you see when you start paying attention over time.

Edit: Just for clarity, this isn't some extensive project I devote time and effort to, I don't have solid answers for you regarding the rigor of my method or why people decide to make or use bots on a niche corner of the internet. I've personally noticed a lot of odd account activity in my few years here that has gotten more common with the ubiquity of LLMs. I'm not claiming bots outnumber real users, either. It's completely fine to disagree! Enjoy the fediverse as it is as you see fit.

I do disagree with your disagreements. Talking politics with people online, via discord and other video chat platforms even pre-AI, has shown me that no quite a few people are like that.

Wouldn't be shocked if we have a less than obvious bot problem but I don't think that's the biggest sign

[–] charokol@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

What is the purpose of bots posting on Lemmy? There’s no karma, no real advertising, and data scraping can be done without posting.

[–] Tippy@sh.itjust.works 2 points 2 days ago

Astroturfing, trolling, testing whether the average commentor can gauge whether they're arguing with a bot someone has been tweaking, who knows. It's really not something I expend a lot of effort or thought on, I've just found a lot of accounts that I question the authenticity of based on odd activity, personally.

[–] CultLeader4Hire@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago

How do you account for simple cognitive dissonance? Humans are infamously inconsistent