It's marketing, it's propaganda, it's psyops. Influencing what posts make it to the front page, what posts stay in hot, what opinions get upvoted or downvoted just to make them look popular or unpopular. Mass reporting for posts that offend them. Having entirely fake, scripted conversations to convey points in a more trusted manner in order to influence the reader.
I wonder that too since according to present statistics (the-federation.info/platform/73) there's over 1.2M Lemmy accounts. The 6mo active users count is a little over 40k. Now I know many of those may be lurkers or people like me who have logins on other instances, but a good number of those would have to be bot accounts. So what are they laying in wait for? Could be shameless promotion and upvoting, but I'm not seeing any of that yet. Hope we're not in for a shitstorm.
Because there is no karma system on lemmy (thank goodness, I'm against karma), you can easily create a 1000s of bots which will upvote your post and bring it to front page.
The solution is not some custom anti-abuse system which can be game. (Stuff like "you can't vote because of the age of your account", ...) IMHO, the solution is bot detection. Since everything is public an an instance, somebody at some point will start scraping instance to detect bot behavior and inform instance owner. It will come with maturity.
If humans have a bot-like behavior, it's okay to mark them as bot. If a human is only posting to promote products/astroturf, who cares if it's misclassified, it doesn't add anything to the discourse. IMHO, that's good riddance.
And in my solution, at the end the instance owner takes action, it's not like there is no human recourse.
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