We were poking around the list of Lemmy servers, and we saw this crazy anomaly. 1.2 million comments in the course of a day or two .... what's going on over there?
Bot instance?
this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2023
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On the contrary!
Was actually making a point on how effortless it was to manipulate those metrics, to evade some of the current, common tactics for detecting bot instances.
Sorry- just saw this. @[email protected]
Was messing around helping out development for anti-spam/botting/etc.... and realized, it was literally as easy as updating a single field in the database to completely fake the numbers.
I had "1 million users" for a week or two, before I reset it back to the actual number, because it was setting off some of the bot alarms.
But... yea, all of the "stats", are essentially effortless to manipulate.