Reddit

are the posting hours normal?

Hey, no judging my sleep ~~schedule~~ arbitrary times when biological necessity triumphs over all the fun things I could do while awake!

Serious reply:

On the individual level we can maybe fortify against the reasons that might make someone want to extract that value.

On the collective level, we should do something about the mechanisms that incentivise that malicious extraction of value in the first place, but that's a whole different beast...

Being a principled conscious consumer makes you a less likely target for advertisement

Agreed, though we should also stress that "less likely" or "unlikely" doesn't mean "never" and that we're not immune against being influenced by ads. That's a point I've seen people in my social circles overlook or blatantly ignore when pointed out, hence me emphasising it.

media literacy

This is probably one of the most critical deficits in general. Even with the best intentions, people make mistakes and it's critical to be aware of and able to compensate that.

Unfortunately, be selective with your trust.

Same as media literacy, I feel like this is a point that would apply even in a world where we're all humans arguing in good faith: Others may have a different, perhaps limited or flawed perspective, or just make mistakes — just as you yourself may overlook things or genuinely have blind spots — so we should consider whose voice we give weight in any given matter.

On the flipside, we may need to accept that our own voice might not be the ideal one to comment on something. And finally, we need to separate those issues of perspective and error from our worth as persons, so that admitting error isn't a shame, but a mark of wisdom.

Be authentic and genuine

That's the arms race we're currently running, isn't it? Developers of bots put effort into making them appear authentic—I overheard someone mention that their newest model included an extra filter to "screw up" some things people have come to consider indicators of machine-generated texts, such as these dashes that are mostly used in particular kinds of formal writing and look out of place elsewhere.

If at all, people tend to just use a hyphen instead - it's usually more convenient to type (unless you've got a typographic compulsion to go that extra step because that just looks wrong). And so the dev in question made their model use less dashes and replace the rest with hyphens to make the text look more authentic.

I wanted to spew when I heard that, but that's beside the point.

So basically, we'd have to constantly be running away from the bots' writing style to set ourselves apart, even as they constantly chase our style to blend in. Our best weapon would be the creative intuition to find a way of phrasing things other humans will understand but bots won't (immediately) be able to imitate.

Being creative on demand isn't exactly a viable solution, at least not individually, and coordinating on the internet is like harding lolcats, but maybe we can work together to carve out some space for humanity.

Why don't Reddit ban them? On Lemmy even vote manipulation is a ban reason

Not getting bots banned is honestly not hard. If you just post uncontroversial vanilla shit they don't care.

That assumes that Reddit actually wants to ban bots. But as long as they're not too obvious, the bots are valuable to them, since they inflate the user count.