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

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

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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.

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[-] otter@lemmy.ca 1 points 2 months ago

I did find confirmation for the first account, but supposedly they are going to make a new account for the automated stuff. That should make it easier for people to ban or block it

https://lemmy.ca/comment/23580356

I didn't find anything in the second account though

[-] JensSpahnpasta@feddit.org 2 points 2 months ago

But is this really a bot? This is a real person trying to help Lemmy by using a tool to post stuff. That's kinda different than those spammy repost bot that we can see on Reddit, which are farming karma in order to start shilling for some scammy product later on or to do political desinfo shit.

There might be a discussion if it's really helpful to mirror stuff from Reddit to Lemmy, but I feel that this is the discussion every community needs to have on its own. In my humble opinion, it is totally okay to try to kickstart a community by implementing some kind of automated system to post content. Nobody will post to an empty forum and if a forum shows some activity even by reposting stuff from Reddit or a bot parsing some RSS feeds, that's kind of okay. It gives people something to discuss about the topic the forum is about.

[-] KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 month ago

Sanitation has stated multiple times on at least one account that they are using a firefox extension to crosspost a queue of things from reddit with touch of a button.

Pushes them very firmly into the “repost spam bot” territory.

[-] frongt@lemmy.zip 1 points 2 months ago

They must have deleted the comment then. They said something like "yes I use a script to crosspost from reddit, I can set it to run when I click a button or automatically".