Full title: I hid a link on my website that only bots can see and told them not to follow it. They broke the rules and in 4 days they went 124,414 levels deep into an endless maze. One bot opened 782,580 doors. I thought this was super interesting, this is how the internet is these days. Thought I’d share.

    • Leigh Weigh@lemmy.world
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      23 hours ago

      Post history and seeing the same username every day. Plus they rarely every respond to questions and comments when they post and what they respond with is generic.

      • Goodeye8@piefed.social
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        22 hours ago

        Maybe it’s the bot of the guy who thought the only way to save the threadiverse is by having bots repost almost everything from Reddit.

      • r0ertel@lemmy.world
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        19 hours ago

        What’s the purpose of doing this as a bot but not declaring the account as a bot account? On other sites, they do it for karma farming, but that doesn’t really apply here, right?

        • cantstopthesignal@sh.itjust.works
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          17 hours ago

          Probably just another layer of analytics for engagement bait in other spaces. They can also copy top comments and train LLMs and whatever else every bad actor does to every internet comment site now. They are like a slime mold and grow toward any source of nutrition except it’s an n-dimensional maze and the nutrition is influencing public opinion and scamming people.

      • Mulligrubs@lemmy.world
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        17 hours ago

        If you see the same username every day, that means you are on every day… only a spy would do that.

        Suspected Chinese agent, possibly Russian

      • Lovable Sidekick@lemmy.world
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        21 hours ago

        In other words, you don’t really know - not that there’s anything wrong with that. Opinions and “it’s obvious” are the social media standard for “fact”.

        • scytale@piefed.zip
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          19 hours ago

          That user has a history of reposting reddit content and the format and pattern of posts are obviously not human. All of its posts are originally from reddit. A simple search of its posts will show you they are copied word for word from an older reddit post. What more evidence do you need?

        • Leigh Weigh@lemmy.world
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          21 hours ago

          I prefer to think of it as being observant and investigating but to each their own. OP has been called out on almost every post and never defended themselves. Could be a human who doesn’t check the replies but either way, the behavior is the same.

      • Fmstrat@lemmy.world
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        9 hours ago

        There’s plenty of documented evidence of alt bots from moderators. Also, the lack of source link is a key factor in why people are interpreting your post that way.

        • time2lose@lemmy.worldOP
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          3 hours ago

          Meh. Ya welcome for content.

          Accusing people of spamming when they given you content is an indication of a reddit agent that intentionally conflate those ideas with spam.

      • Leigh Weigh@lemmy.world
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        19 hours ago

        lol not even a little. I’m trying to grow my lemmy communities. I have no problem with it being a bot, that’s why I haven’t blocked it. My issue is that it’s not declared as a bot. Several times I’ve found myself asking further questions to just realize, it’s that same guy who posted a “my super cool thing” five minutes ago and I won’t get a response to my question. There’s no way he has a jurrasic park themed turtle sanctuary in addition to the other 50 sweet things in his house/yard/town/