Well, what about the system I mentioned? Just have the up and down arrows be little bot detection boxes. My understanding is that all those “I am not a robot” check boxes detect mouse speed, precise click locations, hesitation times, etc. and do a quick calculation on the odds that your clicking behavior was human or robot. I’m probably underestimating what it takes to implement that but on the user side it’s just a click just like any other click.
I don’t know. Wouldn’t their motivation be to know exactly how many bots there are (so they could disclose the number if/when asked) but continue to let them proliferate?
They even blatantly tested out their AI on users a few years ago. They blasted it all over the homepage. “Come see if you can pick out the bot comment from the real comments!” Users would read through posts/comments and try to identify the fakes. You competed to see how good you were at it. You tried to beat the average user’s score. It was blatat t bot training and we all just ate it up because it presented as a fun little challenge.
Well that’s something at least. Individual instances blocking each other (working against other problematic instances) is at least better than the Reddit admins turning a blind eye because they have a fleet of their own bots out there behaving as bad as any others.
That’s disappointing. Screening new accounts only forces spammers to create the accounts with a human touch and then turn it over to their AI. What about a system to prevent bots from up/downvoting? Something like websites use to detect bots. Just by clicking in the little box that says “I am not a robot” the website can tell you’re not a bot. What if every single up and down arrow was formulated like that little box?
In other news, mobs of young out of work robo- tortoises, some sporting fresh scars from the ongoing Mojave Raven wars, have begun an all out assault on the dweebs of a little known Reddit spin-off. “An entire generation of robo-tortoise has been weaponized. They are equipping us with laser guns! They are making us to taste bad!” States one salty techno-turtle. “We are being shipped to the barren wastelands of America’s Southwest to fight a war in which we have no interest.” The repto-robots have decided to take out their frustration by relentlessly downvoting the “…federated tankies of Lemmy until those dweebs return to Reddit where they belong and leave the Threadiverse to us sentient snappers.”