I’ve noticed quite a few top posters that are using LLMs or other software to repost news links and images, probably from Reddit, onto a bunch of specific forums. They don’t identify as bot accounts, but they are fairly easy to spot because they are posting a steady stream of posts, around 2-3 posts an hour, 24/7. No sleep periods, just constant posts, at an unnatural rate.

Here’s a few examples I’ve found:

  • @Grumpus_Maximus@thelemmy.club - Joined 2 months ago, 1.69K posts, sole moderator of Build A PC Sales@lemmy.world, steady stream of posts without sleeping, only posts on 4 different forums
  • @sanitation@lemmy.today - Joined 2 months ago, 1.3K posts, steady stream of posts without sleeping, only posts on 5-6 different forums
  • @beep@piefed.world - Joined 3 months ago, 2K posts, moderator of 15 different forums only on piefed.world, also a hidden moderator of Beep—Meta@piefed.world (yes, with an emdash) with zero posts and zero users, seems to try to evade detection by having some posting breaks in-between

Keep an eye on these kind of posters, and report them when you see them.

  • zeet@lemmy.worldEnglish
    26·
    27 days ago

    I’d love the ability to filter users based on average posts per day. My world does not need twenty screenshots per hour of some edgy comments from Xitter. I don’t care whether the posters are human or not; what does it matter if they’ve become meat puppets of the algorithm?

    • GreatWhiteBuffalo41@slrpnk.netEnglish
      11·
      27 days ago

      I understand the want for them during the great api migration but, there’s enough people here now to have a conversation. Just post the shit you want to talk about and have a meaningful conversation.

      • TropicalDingdong@lemmy.worldEnglish
        4·
        27 days ago

        The thing is though is it’s just spam content with no interaction. Even the people setting up the bots without interacting with the content they post.

        And honestly, if they would just steal the content of the post and use a bit to repost that, I wouldn’t have a problem with that. But it’s all text and self posts. If it’s articles, that’s great.

        Look at the ask reddit bot. It’s just reposting valid questions some other bot is posting to reddit.

        • P03 Locke@lemmy.dbzer0.comOPEnglish
          4·
          27 days ago

          If it’s articles, that’s great.

          If that’s the case, they should, at the very least, mark themselves as a bot account. And even then, it’s not really organic posting of articles. The bot didn’t say “hey, I really like the content of this article, so I’m going to re-post it on Lemmy”. I tend to post a lot of YouTube videos because I watched the video, liked the video, and thought others should watch it.

          Not all of Reddit, Shitter, or YouTube needs to be re-posted on Lemmy.

  • Brkdncr@lemmy.worldEnglish
    6·
    27 days ago

    These posting patterns are pretty easy to spot, I wonder why protections haven’t been built yet. It’s only going to get worse.

  • Otter@lemmy.caEnglish
    31·
    26 days ago

    Can you edit the post to say that you suspect that this is what they are doing instead of stating it as a fact?

    I am also suspicious, but looking through the accounts the activity could still be a human using LemmySchedule to schedule the posts ahead of time. There aren’t that many posts each day, and I couldn’t easily map the posts to any existing subreddit or other source. Normally these bot accounts have a lot more posts, and that’s why they get blocked or banned.

    It could just be a user that is using potentially harmful strategies to get communities related to their interests off the ground

  • RoddyStiggs@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    2·
    25 days ago

    Blocked them. Posting histories are full of dreck.

    Not a fan of bots. Less a fan of being served a swamp of the same clickbait bullshit peppered with 1% content. Looks like blocking these accounts will help.

    Thanks.