Lately, I’ve recognized many posts from very new accounts here, usually younger than a day. They post a couple of news articles and are never to be seen again.
I’ve checked this communitiy’s modlog and many new accounts get banned relatively quickly. Their behaviour is eerily similar, even their profile pictures have similar styles, so it seems to be the same origin.
Out of curiosity, is there some lore I missed?
More seriously, I think we users in this community maybe should be more conscious about this and stop interacting with posts from these profiles.
Dunno if my post makes any sense, it’s just something weird I noticed and wanted to say something about.
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We have been in contact about this with the feddit.org admins, but there isn’t really a whole lot we can do about it and IMHO at least for now it is relatively benign since the articles posted are just links to normal news outlets.
I have actually noticed, and was also considering asking about this. 2 observations from my point.
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The new users with a stream of posts comments in the last day…I think I have noticed them more as they seem to have a higher rate of profile pics. Lemmy does not seem big on profile pics so that stood out to me. I could likely be wrong.
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More new users littering sarky or rude comments to start argumentative behaviour. It’s not even on hot topics either, it’s more subtle posts. It’s a bit odd as Lemmy is usually pretty friendly.
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We are trying to figure out a solution that wont negatively affect genuine users. Issue is that due to certain limitations at the moment finding a solution is difficult. So all we can do is what we have done so far: ban suspicious new accounts that only spam posts into news communities without interaction.
Is Lemmy important enough to attract bots with malicious political intentions? A victory for us.
On a more serious note, I don’t know of any truly effective way to prevent that beyond sheer, hard work and restraint, and even then it’s never easy to distinguish bad intention of legitimate dissenting opinions.
It’s not even as if they express opinions. They only post links (usually of articles). 10 to 30 of them before abandoning the accounts. Why the throwaway accounts?
Are the news articles paywalled/ad supported/propagandistic?
Perhaps someone just trying to get more views to those sites?It’s not even as if they express opinions. They only post links (usually of articles). 10 to 30 of
Exactly, most bonafide nornal new users , usually reacts in several communities within the 1 -2 weeks minimum, before they make a post.
Happy to hear @Emopunker@feddit.org you guys are keeping an eye on this finally. Its been going on for a while, and I have reported this issue to you on occasion the last weeks especially.
These user(s) move to other communities/instances once they get to banned too often in one. Then Usually, after some weeks or a month they circle back to the first, and so on.
As community users, we can report those clear cut post & run users and don’t react to their post to (maybe) discourage them. Their profile and behiavour is pretty obvious, so they can be recognised. At the same time, I encourage the community to be welcoming to bonafide new users ofcourse.
On another matter, will you consider informing the community after you made adjustments or updates to the workings of the Rules ( like recently with the archive. today) for example? I had posted this question some days ago. thnaks
In Germany, we used to put an ASCII art fish for trolls, because they were troll-fishing:
><xX))))o>That was advising others not to react to them/ Maybe we should use something similar for clanker-bots ?
Anything is game to push once narrative
We all have a narrative and try to convince others; that’s what dialogue in forums is all about. The difference is whether it’s done in good faith, trying to debate, learn and share, or in bad faith, diverting, deceiving and pushing misleading debates to promote hidden ideas.
It is not always easy to distinguish one from another, and organized groups take advantage of that.
They are not writing any comments though and if then it is only posting links.
Or bots are just that cheap.
probably bad actors pushing false news.
in regards to ‘not interacting with new users’, I think that’s a bad idea. how will any community/server/instance grow if you never reply or interact with new accounts?
so long as the mods block the obvious trolls/bots/bad actors, I see no reason in why you, or anyone should be avoiding new account interactions.
if you see something nefarious, report it, block them yourself and move along. Let the mods do what they are already doing.
in regards to ‘not interacting with new users’, I think that’s a bad idea. how will any community/server/instance grow if you never reply or interact with new accounts?
I mean, they are pretty easy to spot. They are new accounts that instantly drop several news posts. That is not organic human behaviour.
I personally haven’t seen or experienced it, however I haven’t been actively looking though. hopefully they can implement something to mitigate the issues
Honestly it’s gotten so bad that anyone with an account older than 10 days that mass posts is starting to look super suspicious to me.
Accounts have been popping up, posting and deleting themselves while leaving the posts up. There is no way to block those shitheads as a user.
Really would like a client side block on seeing any posts from accounts older than a certain number of days.
Really would like a client side block on seeing any posts from accounts older than a certain number of days.
Use Voyager app or Tesseract if you like, they have filters you can set. Lemmy devs can’t or won’t do anything about it for now. Maybe next update afaik .
What I do is not engage with new accounts unless they comment.
I do use Voyager but all you get is a tag that it’s a new account and not a filter on all accounts under a certain age.
Even just a filter for all accounts less than 2 days old would be enough to get rid of the spam accounts that get deleted.
I use summit and you can set it up to show how old an account is ( it’s displayed prominently besides the username ), if it’s younger than 30 days.
Mm. heard of that one before … Any good?
Coming from reddit, i continued using Sync. When the dev went MIA again lately, i tried lots of clients and summit really stood out.
Imo it’s the client that uses all of lemmy’s available functions to full extent and enhances the mobile experience with lots of cool features of its own.
hmm didn’t think it was that bad. yeah that feature might be half decent if someone was able to implement it and could mitigate a bunch of nonsense posts like you’re describing
Those are the obvious ones. There are also less obvious ones. For example, if an account exclusively posts and hardly ever makes comments, then there’s something very wrong.
I disagree here - there are a lot of people around here who are not posting comments and that is a totally normal behavior. We know from every forum around there that there are a lot of lurkers who are only reading. There are fewer people who are only liking/upvoting. And then there are fewer people participating and some of them are just submitting links. That’s normal. So let’s not assume that everybody who is just submitting some links into a community is a bot.
(And it is quite easy in the age of LLMs to build a bot that is also posting some random comments like “Great article, thank you”. Account age will also not help as a bad actor can easily create some accounts and let them “age” by simply not using them for a month or so)
Are these bad actors? Because who hasn’t build a twitter-bot or a discord-bot ik their day?
It’s not trivial, but I’m starting to think so. Take this user for example:
https://vger.to/sh.itjust.works/u/Valleci
There are some neutral posts, but many rage-bait articles from a very shitty news source concentrating on this community.
