Apparently a lot of those bots are just farming reddit and reposting here. Which I think in the short term is a good thing. People are more likely to join/stay if they see content. On the other I hope lemmy has the tools to prevent bot content from overwhelming user generated posts to the point that it loses the authenticity.
I would love to have a bot/a few scripts to migrate a lot of the useful posts that were on reddit over here for a few of my hobby communities instead of having to move them manually. I can definitely see a lot of use cases for those.
That’s an interesting take, but I could definitely see it working out. As long as the reposted content isn’t ads or spam, it could help the fediverse have content while it grows.
I don’t understand. Are you claiming that the first 150k users that signed up are all real and that since the rate of growth has increased exponentially that it couldn’t possibly be real users signing up? I don’t dispute that some of it is bots for sure. There are clearly places that have 20k users and 2 posts and stuff like that that are very suspicious. But I don’t think it’s at all reasonable to assert that all of the growth that has occurred are bots. There is absolutely no evidence to suggest that. In fact, I would argue that the amount of activity (posts and comments) increasing alongside the user count is evidence to the contrary. I understand that bots can make posts too, but apart from the obviously labelled bots that are reposting content from reddit and stuff like that, I haven’t seen any bot spam accounts posting links to suspicious sites or anything like that at all. Unless you’re claiming that the bots are posting normal looking comments so that people think they are human? I don’t understand.
before lemmy blew up the count was 150k but many joined in the last few days. sure many are boys but until an effective way to filter them out is there we can’t know the precise numbers.
Sadly those are bots, real amount of users is around 150k. Source: https://lemmy.fmhy.ml/post/176547
Apparently a lot of those bots are just farming reddit and reposting here. Which I think in the short term is a good thing. People are more likely to join/stay if they see content. On the other I hope lemmy has the tools to prevent bot content from overwhelming user generated posts to the point that it loses the authenticity.
I would love to have a bot/a few scripts to migrate a lot of the useful posts that were on reddit over here for a few of my hobby communities instead of having to move them manually. I can definitely see a lot of use cases for those.
We know nothing. We say nothing.
That’s an interesting take, but I could definitely see it working out. As long as the reposted content isn’t ads or spam, it could help the fediverse have content while it grows.
I don’t understand. Are you claiming that the first 150k users that signed up are all real and that since the rate of growth has increased exponentially that it couldn’t possibly be real users signing up? I don’t dispute that some of it is bots for sure. There are clearly places that have 20k users and 2 posts and stuff like that that are very suspicious. But I don’t think it’s at all reasonable to assert that all of the growth that has occurred are bots. There is absolutely no evidence to suggest that. In fact, I would argue that the amount of activity (posts and comments) increasing alongside the user count is evidence to the contrary. I understand that bots can make posts too, but apart from the obviously labelled bots that are reposting content from reddit and stuff like that, I haven’t seen any bot spam accounts posting links to suspicious sites or anything like that at all. Unless you’re claiming that the bots are posting normal looking comments so that people think they are human? I don’t understand.
I don’t see the proof in that link, although maybe I’m missing something, it just seems to imply that is the case.
Agreed. It’s literally just them saying “there are a lot of new users and theoretically they could all be bots, therefore they are all bots”.
Have you made an effort?
before lemmy blew up the count was 150k but many joined in the last few days. sure many are boys but until an effective way to filter them out is there we can’t know the precise numbers.