110

Be wary of spammy reposting bots (lemmy.dbzer0.com)

submitted 2 months ago by p03locke@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/fediverse@lemmy.world

45 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I've noticed quite a few top posters that are using LLMs or other software to repost news links and images, probably from Reddit, onto a bunch of specific forums. They don't identify as bot accounts, but they are fairly easy to spot because they are posting a steady stream of posts, around 2-3 posts an hour, 24/7. No sleep periods, just constant posts, at an unnatural rate.

Here's a few examples I've found:

@Grumpus_Maximus@thelemmy.club - Joined 2 months ago, 1.69K posts, sole moderator of Build A PC Sales@lemmy.world, steady stream of posts without sleeping, only posts on 4 different forums
@sanitation@lemmy.today - Joined 2 months ago, 1.3K posts, steady stream of posts without sleeping, only posts on 5-6 different forums
@beep@piefed.world - Joined 3 months ago, 2K posts, moderator of 15 different forums only on piefed.world, also a hidden moderator of Beep—Meta@piefed.world (yes, with an emdash) with zero posts and zero users, seems to try to evade detection by having some posting breaks in-between

Keep an eye on these kind of posters, and report them when you see them.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[-] mesamunefire@piefed.social 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

I think thats why it would be an opt in or moderator service. Like a dropdown or something that a mod can pop in, set for a time, then remove when people behave.

If a subset of users are posting say once ever 10 minutes, it floods the system/community pretty badly. Regardless if its lemmy/piefed/etc..etc.. Ive seen comics get flooded a couple of times from people (probably in good nature) post the ENTIRE comic (hundreds of posts) in a couple days time. It makes new very difficult to manage until the mods would come in.

Comments dont typically have the same issues, so I think posts should be were we draw the line. But again the way I see it, it will be optional and a tool to mitigate a user from posting too many posts per day in one community.

An Auto-mod tool might be good to start with? Not sure. Last time I messed with piefed and lemmy, piefed was easier to hook into the code and lemmy was easier on the API side. So the auto-mod tool could possibly start working on lemmy? I dunno, its been a while. Im probably going to try piefed first and see what works on my small instance.

All conjecture until I find the time/motivation.