MediaSensationalism

It's complicated, but no, I don't.

The nearest bus stop is an hour away, and it's for interstate transit. 🤷

The place I'm planning to buy a home is so remote that I'm considering a backup car.

I learned how to repair my own vehicles after I was quoted $2,600 to install a $40 part. I could've also had an entire rebuilt engine shipped and swapped it in myself for about half that, but I ultimately decided to go with the $40 + basic tools.

I could sure use some of that money to buy the next iPhone. Just imagine what my friends would think if I didn't.

I didn't read very far up into the thread. Sorry.

Automated filters will just drive determined botters to play the system and perfect their craft until they can no longer be automatically identified, in my opinion. I'm more of the stance that accounts should be reviewed manually so that a leap into convincing bot accounts will need to be much more dramatic, and therefore difficult. If it's done the hard way from the start with staff who know how to identify these accounts, it may keep it from growing into an issue to begin with.

Any threshold to be automatically flagged for review should be relatively low, but the process should also be quick and efficient. Adding more metrics to the flagging process only means botters will have a narrower gaze to avoid. Once they start crunching the numbers and streamline mimicking real user accounts it's game over.

Signup safeguards will never be enough because the people who create these accounts have demonstrated that they are more than willing to do that dirty work themselves.

Let's look at the anatomy of the average Reddit bot account:

1. Rapid points acquisition. These are usually new accounts, but it doesn't have to be. These posts and comments are often done manually by the seller if the account is being sold at a significant premium.

2. A sudden shift in contribution style, usually preceded by a gap in activity. The account has now been fully matured to the desired amount of points, and is pending sale or set aside to be "aged". If the seller hasn't loaded on any points, the account is much cheaper but the activity gap still exists.

• When the end buyer receives the account, they probably won't be posting anything related to what the seller was originally involved in as they set about their own mission unless they're extremely invested in the account. It becomes much easier to stay active in old forums if the account is now AI-controlled, but the account suddenly ceases making image contributions and mostly sticks to comments instead. Either way, the new account owner is probably accumulating much less points than the account was before.
• A buyer may attempt to hide this obvious shift in contribution style by deleting all the activity before the account came into their possession, but now they have months of inactivity leading up to the beginning of the accounts contributions and thousands of points unaccounted for.

3. Limited forum diversity. Fortunately, platforms like this have a major advantage over platforms like Facebook and Twitter because propaganda bots there can post on their own pages and gain exposure with hashtags without having to interact with other users or separate forums. On Lemmy, programming an effective bot means that it has to interact with a separate forum to achieve meaningful outreach, and these forums probably have to be manually programmed in. When a bot has one sole objective with a specific topic in mind, it makes great and telling use of a very narrow swath of forums. This makes Platforms like Reddit and Lemmy less preferred for automated propaganda bot activity, and more preferred for OnlyFans sellers, undercover small business advertisers, and scammers who do most of the legwork of posting and commenting themselves.

My solution? Implement a weighted visual timeline for a user's points and posts to make it easier for admins to single out accounts that have already been found to be acting suspiciously. There are other types of malicious accounts that can be troublesome such as self-run engagement farms which express consistent front page contributions featuring their own political or whatever lean, but the type first described is a major player in Reddit's current shitshow and is much easier to identify.

Most important is moderator and admin willingness to act. Many subreddit moderators on Reddit already know their subreddit has a bot problem but choose to do nothing because it drives traffic. Others are just burnt out and rarely even lift a finger to answer modmail, doing the bare minimum to keep their subreddit from being banned.

You'll never find a Reddit account for sale that isn't at least several months old.

If I haven't heard of it, then the average Windows user definitely hasn't heard of it.

The issue starts at the fact that it's difficult to find a computer sold by a common major distributor with Linux already installed, nor does Linux have any marketing aside from word of mouth to compete with the aggressive Microsoft/Apple duopoly.

The threshold to entry begins at simply having the technical prowess to install an alternative operating system on one's computer, which I don't believe a good majority of people are even capable of. Before that, people also need an incentive to transition in the first place. They've probably been using their current OS for a good portion of their life and are more than comfortable with it without putting themselves through another learning curve.

The average person isn't considering an alternative to what they're already using, and if they are, it usually isn't Linux. The biggest problem isn't appeal or ease of use; it's exposure and immediate accessibility.

That said, performance and simplicity would be an excellent selling point for Linux. It would be absolutely worth banking on the open-source nature of it to appeal to a growing demographic of people interested in privacy-oriented tech as well.

Bots don't upvote. There's so much voting activity here as a ratio to actual contributions that my first impression was that the votes might be faked.