I think this would be more effective on the fediverse too, bots are trying to engage as wide an audience as possible, which gives us a metric to monitor activity across the fediverse.
For example, a user might post an article to the news community on their preferred instances whereas a bot will unbiasedly post it on all instances it deems fit to share with.
This isn’t perfect but it’s another metric to help weight and quantify bot activity for an automated defense system. RSS feeds and the like can specifically flag their accounts as automated to avoid misbans from the system too
PieFed has some tools already. Like if someone mostly contributes posts rather than comments, they get a label slapped next to their username to indicate a potential unregistered bot account.
Similarly an account less than two weeks old gets a different label, and someone who gives/receives mainly downvotes rather than upvotes a different label. You can also apply custom icons next to users of your choice (only you would see these).
They are very helpful! Seeing such a label may change how you interact with that “person” - e.g. you could block them, or answer differently or not at all. Knowledge is power.
How do we stop that from happening here.
Crowdsourced sentiment flagging, proof of work for posting, per community post history analysis and a paid staff of admins who won’t abuse their power
TL;DR: We won’t stop it happening here, in fact it’s already happening
I suggest that somebody with the means and technical know-how should establish something like this. Won’t completely stop them, but it’ll help
I think this would be more effective on the fediverse too, bots are trying to engage as wide an audience as possible, which gives us a metric to monitor activity across the fediverse.
For example, a user might post an article to the news community on their preferred instances whereas a bot will unbiasedly post it on all instances it deems fit to share with.
This isn’t perfect but it’s another metric to help weight and quantify bot activity for an automated defense system. RSS feeds and the like can specifically flag their accounts as automated to avoid misbans from the system too
PieFed has some tools already. Like if someone mostly contributes posts rather than comments, they get a label slapped next to their username to indicate a potential unregistered bot account.
Similarly an account less than two weeks old gets a different label, and someone who gives/receives mainly downvotes rather than upvotes a different label. You can also apply custom icons next to users of your choice (only you would see these).
They are very helpful! Seeing such a label may change how you interact with that “person” - e.g. you could block them, or answer differently or not at all. Knowledge is power.