Lemmy Bots and Tools

I buikt a minimal bot some time ago on reddit. It was very simple. It reacted with predefined response when it detected specific terms.

While it was mostly made for a joke. I was surprised how efficient this was. I received mostly positive return as well as some infuriating responses. Still this was effective.

The current platform appears to actively prefer the russian bot presence. So an option might be to provide a FOSS bot maker that anyone could easily use that will also have the property to be easy to not be detected immediately as a bot.

Then these bots should both counter russian bots and promote this bot creation tool or even platform (bit a platform would certainly be easier to detect and block).

But by doing so, the dead Internet is closer than ever.

Code: https://git.esy.fun/yogsototh/redbot

See stack.yaml file for the env var to set. If you run it it should start a web interface. And you can create new bots from there.

It really is everyone. It's not all bots. There's troll farms that employ people in poor countries. Republican think tanks are their biggest customers, but nation states like Isreal and russia get in on the act. You can hire the same people to shill your product for you as well. That's why you always see karma farming on Reddit, they're seasoning the account in order to sell it. You can buy accounts for every platform or just pay for likes.

Fight quantity with quality.

ITT: “Why you think it Russian bot, comrade? Russia never hack!”

It irritates me a lot when posters edit their original post with "ITT" with claims as if it were prevalent. From what I can see, at that point there were three comments, and only one of them said what you paraphrase-change-quote and reply to. Just reply to that comment. Which you didn't do at all.

This approach feels evasive passive aggressive to me, and not constructive. Maybe a first step to combat them would be to reply in-place and not let them stand without context/answers where they are.

The golden age of social networks is over. Even if a comment section is not full of Russian bots, it's either full with ChatGPT bots OR some crawler bots that farm content. That's good, people need to stop their naive approach towards social media, that we've had so far. Communication will probably become more intimate as a counter-reaction. Until then, there is no need to fight for something that is simply obsolete.

You won't be able to do a thing without some level of invasion of privacy (phone # verification would probably be the best).

We're unfortunately rapidly approaching the point where we have to make a decision A) a little invasion or B) allowing bots to roam free and spread propaganda across all major social platforms. Even if you choose path A it's up to the platform to implement it properly. See tiktok the racism and propaganda there has SKYROCKETED since being "allowed" to stay in the US (backdoor agreements to allow propaganda bots)

Are we even sure if Russian need bot ? Doesn't America willfully elect pro Russian leader ?

when you come across one, leave a comment explaining said user is a bot and has a suspicious post history, then walk away. there's no point you trying to argue with them, best you can do is paint a target on them for other unsuspecting users who may see your comment. if they are in breach of whatever platforms t&cs, no matter how minor, report them. overload the bots with bot reports

What makes you so sure they’re Russian bots? What are they saying that gives you that impression?

Don’t feed the trolls. Block them