It's quite sad to see everything related to the blackout on /r/programming wiped.
It's quite sad to see everything related to the blackout on /r/programming wiped.
/r/programming came back up two days ago and as far as I can tell everything relating to the blackout was wiped. I kinda expected it since spez was admin.
Another thing that surprised me was how much chatGPT bot spam there is (danm it is so so bad, wonder what the mods are doing over there.... ah yes, spez).
I used to sort by hot so it was hidden away a bit for me before.
Anyways I hope Lemmy does not fall into the same pitfalls!
goes back into lurk mode
Another thing that surprised me was how much chatGPT bot spam there is
Not really a bad thing. Part of the protest was to devalue the platform...
See what /r/ProgrammerHumor/ is doing - all titles are camelCase, and all the comments started
includingandreturningthings. It's not really something anymore that reddit could sell to AI content farms.If mods are removed for participating in the blackout, the next best thing is probably to let their sub go completely unmoderated and let things turn into a shitshow with unable content by spam bots.
Don't think you can really teach an AI bot something by letting it regurgitate it's own output
Lol, imagine if they included escape keys for various languages. Then reddit would really never be able to sell the data.
What a shit show of a website
We must prevent these kinds of bots on getting a foothold here.
I acknowledge that we do have bots here [lemmy], reposting top posts from reddit. As we grow in number. We must also scale down these bots until the day that only moderating related bots are existing in our ecosystem.
As i argued in another comment, there are many useful bots for certain niche communities that I really think have a place here, even though I am generally wary of AI accounts infesting the fediverse as well.
Good examples for good and very useful, yet not mod work related bots are on TCG/CCG subs like magic the gathering and hearthstone to provide context to card names, or convert deck codes into a nicely formatted table of the used cards. Or on the Lego sub, returning any set number as a link to the proper bricklink entry. This kind of bot should be allowed and even encouraged to be used where appropriate.
Then there are the plenty of irrelevant and annoying bots we really can do without, like the alphabetical order bot, haiku bot, the dozens of bots quoting LOTR or Star Wars characters, and so on. Like most reddit jokes they stopped being funny fairly quickly and now add nothing to the conversation, but are being kept around for karma.
And then there are the more insidious bots that are about to become widespread, being harder to detect the more their refinement advances. It is going to be a constant arms race between bot detection and bot deception skills.
There are some bots that are useful for everyone (community specific ones mostly), those I have no qualms with as they help everyone in that community.
The ones I abhor are the spam bots ones, different accounts giving variations of the same messages, possibly to farm karma or inflate activity numbers (I wouldn't rule anything out when it comes to spez making his darling look active).
I also hate down vote bots as I feel they don't contribute to anything.Good examples for good and very useful, yet not mod work related bots are on TCG/CCG subs like magic the gathering and hearthstone to provide context to card names, or convert deck codes into a nicely formatted table of the used cards. Or on the Lego sub, returning any set number as a link to the proper bricklink entry.
Yes, thank you for that. I guess I used the wrong term, I should have said "Service Bots" those bots who provide useful service for the community.
and yes, entertainment and joke bots are tiring. (they can exist but, can we apply a limit on their frequency? let's say an entertainment bot can only post a maximum of 5 posts per week for a small instance and 50 posts per week for a significantly larger instance. That way it would still remain novel and it's like a lottery where people are looking forward to its next appearance.
And then there are the more insidious bots that are about to become widespread, being harder to detect the more their refinement advances. It is going to be a constant arms race between bot detection and bot deception skills.
this is the hardest part, as the bot farms typically have the advantage of first strike. If we are not careful, we would be left behind as being on defense puts us in the position of being a reactionary player in this game of whack-a-bot.
There already is some ChatGPT bot and I see people bringing it into threads sometimes. I downvote almost every person who does so, as I've yet to see a single case where it was actually asked for or meaningfully contributed.
I want more communities to have rules against unsolicited AI comments and for them to better enforce them (one of the cases I'm referring to was in a community that already had a rule against AI comments, but the comment had still been up for a while and had been upvoted).
Anyways I hope Lemmy does not fall into the same pitfalls!
I really hope! Just watchout for Meta
I think the majority in the fediverse would just move to an instance that defederated meta, at least I know I would and I have a feeling that I am a typical fediverse user
Yeah I have the feeling that sign-up should probably default to be manually moderated, to avoid a bot-swarm taking over accounts (and well probably a lot of bot instances need to be blacklisted then as well).
I'm not sure how dirty the game of big social media is/will be, but if they really feel threatened, they may start something like that (might make sense to be legally secured in that case...).
What should meta possible change about Lemmy or programming.dev? They have no power here even if we federate with them.
They have no power here even if we federate with them.
The current matter with Meta is that they have bad intentions towards the fediverse
https://infosec.pub/post/400702
And even if you don't have Threads app installed, Meta is also a privacy threat to fediverse users. If there are fediverse instances that are still federated with Meta.
Ross Schulman, senior fellow for decentralization at digital rights nonprofit the Electronic Frontier Foundation, notes that if Threads emerges as a massive player in the fediverse, there could be concerns about what he calls “social graph slurping." Meta will know who all of its users interact with and follow within Threads, and it will also be able to see who its users follow in the broader fediverse. And if Threads builds up anywhere near the reach of other Meta platforms, just this little slice of life would give the company a fairly expansive view of interactions beyond its borders.
https://www.wired.com/story/meta-threads-privacy-decentralization/
Ah yes, spez. I got permabanned the day 3p died for harrasment, clicked the link and it was a comment I had made a week prior insulting spez.
He really leans into the man baby version of Elon
Yeah he's kinda a wannabe Elon, but I think he hasn't really found a fan base as Elon has, I'm not sure anyone really likes him lol
As a robosexual, I only approve of Lucy Liu bots
No need for lurk mode here friend
how much chatGPT bot spam there is
It doesn't surprise me at all. The spam was already there on /r/programming and /r/coding way before the blackout. I tried to report all the posts, I asked to become a mod to clean all this shit (and was rejected), but nothing worked. They don't want to clean the mess, and that's another reason why I don't care if reddit dies.
As for /r/learnprogramming, it's still filled with spam or people who cannot do a proper google query, it's as hopeless as the rest. I'm unhappy for all the newbies who want to learn something. I hope the "learnprogramming" of lemmy will be more successful.
To be fair, new programmers generally don’t know enough to construct a proper Google query either. And yes there are some lazy people who just don’t try. But sometimes you know what you want to achieve but any query you try seems to be unhelpful. For example, if I want to learn how to store settings in c++ the first link for me tells me to use boost. Now I need to learn about linking libraries and 300 other boost-isms. While anyone with any basic knowledge could recommend reading strings line by line and splitting the string on the equal sign.
Judging by quality of Google search results I believe experienced devs have the same problems with Google as well..
I had some lengthy period of time where I enjoyed regularly helping folks in r/learnprogramming. But it got exhausting fast. For every person putting in a good attempt at learning, there was 10 people who couldn't do the most basic level of googling and content was often extremely repetitive as a result.
The sub also faced a constant stream of people who just wanted to self advertise their own YouTube videos for teaching programming, as if the lack of such was the barrier to learning.
Oh, and soooo many people who clearly just wanted to be told the answer to their homework questions and weren't even hiding that.
I posted a question on one of theses subs a few weeks ago and had mostly very generic answer that clearly didn't read all the post. I was confused at the time but it makes sense now, it was the same kind of basic trooblesooting steps by chatGPT. Reddit is doomed, there are way too much bots. We can only hope to find a solution before it spreads to the whole internet.
We'll have to prove we're a human every time and log in every time we use a service to be sure it doesn't have bots. But AI will get better and better at those too. Is captcha the next level above Go? Lol
Testing to see if I can psot here (languages seem to be messing some things up)