this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2023
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CW: Homphobia. I've only seen one thread attacked by a bot so far. It repeatedly posted a loooong homophobic comment pretending to be a thoughtful and objective analysis of why gay men have lower life expectancy due to being "sExuaL" and apparently "DiSeAsEd". It posted the same comment multiple times in the thread and responded to multiple comments including its own with the same comment over and over again. Not super jazzed to see that crap here, hoping we can avoid a botpocalypse on the Fediverse.
I had to remember where I blocked that "user", it was over on my Kbin account. Here is the user if anyone wants to preview them and preemptively block them: https://kbin.social/u/dickusmungus/comments
Hey thanks for the link. That is a sad account.
No problem! I went back and looked through the comments and posts again and now I'm uncertain if it is actually a bot or just a really sick person acting like one. Either way, I've blocked them. I was on a thread about cookies missing chocolate chips of all places for that nonsense to show up.
It actually seems like a person when I looked but still the behaviour seems worthy of a block just to avoid that first 5 seconds of confusion if you stuble upon a comment.
Oof. Yeah, I hope that too.
Downvoting bot spam actually does help. Good UX should hide unconstructive comments anyway. Will there be trash? Yes, but it's more or less under control on Reddit because of user voting effects.
The real danger is in letting bots vote more than letting them comment or post. We're safe as long as humans can outvote the bots... but will that status quo continue? Thatβs our biggest existential risk.