this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2023
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This was a problem on reddit too. Anyone could create accounts - heck, I had 8 accounts:
one main, one alt, one "professional" (linked publicly on my website), and five for my bots (whose accounts were optimistically created, but were never properly run). I had all 8 accounts signed in on my third-party app and I could easily manipulate votes on the posts I posted.
I feel like this is what happened when you'd see posts with hundreds / thousands of upvotes but had only 20-ish comments.
There needs to be a better way to solve this, but I'm unsure if we truly can solve this. Botnets are a problem across all social media (my undergrad thesis many years ago was detecting botnets on Reddit using Graph Neural Networks).
Fwiw, I have only one Lemmy account.
I’m curious what value you get from a bot? Were you using it to upvote your posts, or to crawl for things that you found interesting?
The latter. I was making bots to collect data (for the previously-mentioned thesis) and to make some form of utility bots whenever I had ideas.
I once had an idea to make a community-driven tagging bot to tag images (like hashtags). This would have been useful for graph building and just general information-lookup. Sadly, the idea never came to fruition.
Cool, thank you for clarifying!