Is the bot/troll situation getting worse?

Politics is banned from c/memes@lemmy.world

And speaking as a mod, report things. The vast majority of things I've dealt with as a mod were ones I saw myself or things friends sent on discord. People need to utilize the report function more often if they want moderation on things. We're not psychic.

As for being more stringent on the not being a dick rule, no. There's a base level of civility we expect but if we start getting super stringent on what constitutes being a dick, that's imposing moderator will on community and its what most of us left reddit to get away from.

Lastly, it's the Internet. Assholes exist everywhere. You are not going to escape it, ever, if you're using public servers. It's pretty much required to accept that fact just to use the Internet. Moderators do not exist to prune and preen social media to make it more comfortable for people. We remind people to follow the rules and act upon those who do not. If you're not breaking the rules then we're not going to "interact" because we have our own lives and our own posts we are interested in.

Election year in the US and EU while Russia is invading a neighbor and China possibly preparing to do the same. There couldn‘t have been a worse time for LLMs to be so accessible, capable and fairly unregulated. The perfect conditions to make this year the worst for internet content we‘ve ever seen. By a landslide. We will look at the last 10 years and feel nostalgic on how good these years were with their little bot armies, cute clickbait and adorable fake news.

A lot of it depends on the instance. I think there's a little bit of a smartest bears type of problem going on, with a lot of the bad-faith content coming from just ignorant and abrasive people being sincerely ignorant and abrasive, not anything that's a bot or a deliberate troll.

Personally, I've done some rounds of unsubscribing from tech and politics subs on lemmy.ml and lemmy.world, and when I've done that my amount of toxic content and interactions went way down. I think the prevalence of the exact same thing on the tech subs points to it probably being just a bad-person problem in large proportion, although I'm sure deliberate malfeasance is at the root of some of it also.

People here are blaming politics. I don't think that's it. The quality of comments and discussion here has taken a massive nosedive for the past four months or so, no matter what the topic is.

I think it's pretty simple, the terrible won. Everyone who wants good quality discussion left quickly when people started to act terrible. They didn't come back. So now we've created the toxic enabling environment that is enabling it hard today.

You can fix it with moderation, but that's a lot of work, and people get really angry.

I'm pretty close to just cutting my losses on lemmy. It's heading in the same direction as reddit but with less moderation, and simply because it's smaller, the awfulness is more visible.

Being a jerk is extremely subjective - someone could brand you much worse than that just from a polite disagreement from your side, that they don't want to deal with. Aside from anything else, this is a highly "techie-y" space with a ton of strongly held opinions and ideals, and misunderstandings when communicating/discussing them happen. A lot. It will keep happening. People will look like asses without necessarily doing so intentionally.

Now, outright trolling, spamming, shitting on discussions with obvious bad faith participation, consistently derailing unrelated threads with one's hobby horse, obvious flamebaiting and so on... great. Reporting and removing more of that should be a priority everywhere.

Banning politics from any non-political community that can be persuaded to do so also sounds like a great idea on general principle. Politics is poison (particularly what passes for it in the US), and it would be polite to not shove it down the entire fediverse's throat. Every geographical sub is politics, every news sub is politics, there are dedicated politics and politicalmemes communities, and still it's fucking everywhere else also. Asklemmy and NoStupidQuestions are full of thinly veiled soapboxing (which leads to a lot of awfully stupid questions). People who want to JAQ off to politics can easily make their own community for that (that way, the rest of us can block it, as intended), or else keeping it in their pants would've been kinda polite, idk. Seems odd to insist on posting political stuff everywhere.

Out of curiosity, can you specify the topics or give specific examples of this shitty behavior you speak of? Without examples it is impossible to determine if you are discussing behavior that is straight-up pathological (e.g. name-calling) or people having a different opinion.

Yeah I've encountered a few accounts lately who either have mental health issues or are bots designs to stir discord. Their entire posting history is divisive shit stirring.

Funny how every 4 years the internet gets markedly nastier. I wonder why???

You're not imagining it. I'm pretty sure you can see regular work from propaganda teams on lemmy. I'd love to see the backed logs to confirm it.

They tend to work in very hostile teams to brigade topics.

Permanently Deleted

Permanently Deleted

I've been noticing the same sort of behaviour that you're talking about. And while I don't know the cause, I don't think that it's caused by trolls or bots. Instead I'm guessing a few potential factors:

1. Demographic concentration in general purpose, lax moderation instances, tailored to attract your typical Reddit user instead of more reasonable people.
2. Lemmy+Kbin users being proportionally more combative, entitled, petty, and/or whiny, due to how people reached this platform.
3. "Powerjanny" mentality being inherited from Reddit, specially given the likely higher proportion of former Reddit moderators here.
4. General lack of mod tools, forcing moderators to take sub-optimal decisions on how to handle users and content.
5. Normalisation of witch hunting, making people walk on eggs to avoid being confused with witches, and assuming that the ones not walking on eggs fly on a broom.
6. Normalisation of stupidity, and subsequent normalisation of oversimplifications, assumptions, genetic fallacies, phobia against uncertainty, decontextualisation, etc.; with those things either making the stupid act in a hostile way, or others act in a hostile way towards the stupid.
7. Natural reinforcement of behaviour in social groups.

This is already a rather large wall of text and I'm trying to be succinct, but feel free to ask further reasoning on any of those points.

Try to find an instance that bans trolls?

Half of the traffic everywhere is bots:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1264226/human-and-bot-web-traffic-share/

Maybe because I don’t use Lemmy at real bot hours, I haven’t seen them. Maybe see a spam bot every other day.

I also tend to sort by top 6 hours or top 12 hours so a lot of low effort content gets filtered out.

I also don’t consider people who make off the wall comments or hold opinions I disagree with or think are uniformed or stupid as trolls.

The other thing is that I comment with the philosophy that not every comment signifies a response and so if a reply is a troll or in bad faith, I just keep scrolling.

Another place I frequent got rid of the downvote so if people actually disagree with you they have to use words to make their point. Kinda funny how that solves a lot of issues.

Nah, things seem okay. I've noticed more politics misinformation since it's an election year.

I’ve certainly encountered a few of them myself. I keep reporting them.

I've seen two trolls recently, but you can see them from very far away, and they post in general ask communities like AskLemmy or No Stupid questions.

On smaller communities, they are not around that much. And I don't go to news or politics communities.

As the fediverse becomes more and more of a feasible alternative to corporate social media, it will be inevitable that trolls and spammers will use our platform for malicious things. All we can do is to get better at moderation, maybe somehow bust these farms.

Yeah we should have ignore and reporting lists that is on an invite only basis, which then can be shared by users of said list. If you didnt get invited then you should be able to copy a users reported/ignored list to make the whole fediverse more palatable. Each bunch of list users can then cross reference each potential bad actors. Then each month each admin could implement a ban of thoses accounts and perhaps try to filter new incomers.

Totally true. I made a totally reasonable comment about a month ago (stated that women shouldn’t be hit on at the gym by randos), and I got downvoted to oblivion and the comment was spammed by 7 different users who essentially acted like I was Hitler. Then they started spamming my comment history and I had to delete all of my old posts.

Seemed like a real person was behind it, but may have been using bots to spam me.

if I wanted to bring the Fediverse down or at least keep my customers from going there, I would sow this stuff as much as I can

Agree. And that's been my experience here too. I made two posts critical of reddit and they each seemed to have been astroturfed by toxic reddit shills.

I think it would require a lot of active and dedicated mods and admins, which I'm doubtful is doable. I don't know that there's a fix for this but a "true block" (instead of the current "mute") might help; but there are major downsides to that type of feature as well. I wrote in a blog that it might require an advanced AI to moderate everything.

Just so everyone is aware, this is the thread OP interpreted as so abusive it would warrant banning this person across multiple instances.

In this thread, you’ll notice that another user dares to disagree with haui_lemmy. haui_lemmy interprets that as trolling, and goes on a crusade to purge the entire lemmyverse of dissent.

Permanently Deleted

In any given public space, the pendulum swings endlessly. Or is it just a wrecking ball? Can't tell.
Anyway, nothing lasts forever. More so for human relationships else the divorce rate wouldn't be as high as it is.
As products of knowledge and emotions ranging from zero to Infinity, the variety will always divide one from the other at some point. Even twins can grow to dislike each other, let alone complete strangers.
So asking for uniformity is a lost cause from the start. Civility is enforceable up to a point. And chaos is unreasonably violent.

The obvious solution is compromise. Some like to give and take in turns, others to merge opinions into something that all sides agree to or something no one wants. Yet nothing is guaranteed to work because we simply aren't built that way.

Individuals will individualize, eventually. Willingly or not.

Bots are probably increasing in number. Even without improvements in technology, people’s adeptness at using robots will continue to increase.

I was about to left Lemmy/Kbin for good when some stupid fascists from Lemmy(grad).ml called me names and harassed me, despite the fact that I'm neurodivergent (like that would stop them from doing such actions, but anyway). And then I started blocking every community and user from those places, as well as any community/magazine about US politics or about any US topic because I don't give a damn heck about that place. And my experience improved really well.

Only the wet-lipped and dry-eared are upset by trolls.