Yep and the slow gutting of the education system isn’t making it any better.

You have an entire generation coming of voting age who are rabid Trump supporters. They don’t care about policies or democracy or public institutions. They don’t care about healthcare, social securities, or the stability of the economy.

They don’t care about any of the things that have been built up through generations. They lack critical thinking ability.

The recipe works. If you make dumb kids they will vote for dumb people. It works so well that part of the future plan for a trump presidency is to get rid of the department of education. Solidifying the Republican party indefinitely.

Without critical thinking and with mass media it’s so easy to say every problem that people deal with is because the “other side” made it so. Even if the other side has been doing everything possible to achieve the opposite.

Google should be subject to antitrust legislation regardless.

Their position as a monopoly is what enables this.

This is more of a symptom the cause is the monopolization of the internet largely by Google

The grand majority of Mozilla’s spending is for engineers.

They use chromium.

Firefox does not.

The grand majority of software engineering effort goes into the browser development that they never have to work on for the most part.

Yes, and with reddit having a baseline corporate & bot astroturfing rate of ~25% that’s not exactly a good bar to measure by.

I… That’s not how this works. Or at least that’s not the context I’m referring to.

I can make an account (or 1000, Lemmy doesn’t exactly have controls to stop me) and run it as a bot, and NOT mark it as a bot. And use it to automatically manipulate the tone of conversations and threads without anyone knowing. And the premise of your argument is now void.

Labeling of bots is done via goodwill.

We’re not worried about goodwill users in this context. We’re talking about astroturfing bots posing as actual users. That said, labeled bots are still a problem if their content out grows organic user content, since that just isolates us, and erodes our community in favor of w/e interesting content bots scaped up today.

Which is a massive problem on almost every social media platform already. And will come to Lemmy soon enough.

This seems like classic corporate backtracking when their customers spot a terrible, deliberate decision.

I didn’t think that’s the case here

However, would you rather that the feedback of users NOT change behavior? I’m not entirely sure what your end game is here, you WANT corporations to ignore and not take action on feedback?

How can they block this for everyone?

Unfortunately the bot problem is coming to Lemmy.

Bots posting content is already a thing here, and then taking up front page space is already a thing.

Lemmy is speed running “How to lose your sense of community”.

This… This is the shit tower.

It’s made up of fools who follow fools, and soon to be fools who follow AI ran by people with an agenda.

Gotcha so you actually stated your previous question in bad faith as you had no interest in the answer to begin with.

Recurring!

You can’t really tell.

It’s also a very very VERY small platform compared to other social media platforms like Reddit. (I had another comment where I calculated this but it’s ridiculously small)

It is unlikely that it would see anywhere near the same level of dedicated bot activity due to the low return on invested effort.

This is a problem that will become greater once the value of astroturfing and shifting opinion on Lemmy is high enough.

You’re missing the big impact here which is that bots can shift public opinion in mass which affects you directly.

Gone are the days where individuals have their own opinions instead today opinions are just osmosised through social media.

And if social media is essentially just a message bought by whoever can pay for the biggest bot farm, then anyone who thinks for themselves and wants to push back immediately becomes the enemy of everyone else.

This is not a future that you want.

Mhm, I love dismissive “Look, it already works, and there’s nothing to improve” comments.

Lemmy lacks significant capabilities to effectively handle the bots from 10+ years ago. Nevermind bots today.

The controls which are implemented are implemented based off of “classic” bot concerns from nearly a decade ago. And even then, they’re shallow, and only “kind of” effective. They wouldn’t be considered effective for a social media platform in 2014, they definitely are not anywhere near capability today.

Lemmy has no capability to handle non-advanced bots from yesteryear.

It’s most definitely not capable of handing bots today and is absolutely unprepared for handling bots tomorrow.

The fediverse is honestly just pending the necessary popularity in order to be turned into bot slop with no controls.

Give it time and the mega corps will do it for you.

PR nightmares will keep significant exploit fixes coming. Microsoft isn’t that stupid.

They have the concept of a antitrust breakup.