Reddit has so many bots, formulaic comments, and clear patterns (reposts, call-and-response, joke chains, & copypasta), that it seems useful to farm Lemmy for more unique comments performing well to steal.
I could see value of someone farming these comments because there’s far less of all that and people are actually creative much of the time. I don’t know if this would be more trouble than it’s worth, but got to wondering.
Is anyone doing this? Farming Lemmy for, especially, comments to post on Reddit to make themselves seem more authentic?
Do you know of this is plausible, or have you actually seen it happen?
Just to be very clear, I don’t want to do this. I abandoned all my other accounts during the Great Enshittification. But there are a few bot accounts that post a lot here, across several instances, focussing on reposting from Reddit and elsewhere. Is that what they’re trying to do?
Is anyone doing this? Farming Lemmy for, especially, comments to post on Reddit to make themselves seem more authentic?
Do you know of this is plausible, or have you actually seen it happen?
I think you’ve asked the “wrong” question because you included the specific source of “Lemmy” and a specific intent of “to make themselves seem more authentic”.
If I throw those parts of the questions away, then: Yes, people are doing it; Yes, it’s plausible; Yes, I’ve seen it happen. I’m absolutely certain because I’m part of a team that’s been doing it for almost a decade.
Overall, there’s WAY less motive here for karma farming, primarily because global karma/vote counts aren’t a thing that’s tracked on lemmy. Actual reputation that you establish as you interact with communities here is more important, which is one of the reasons I like lemmy a lot more than reddit.
Why would you farm a site with 1/1000th the users when you can just farm the original site?
The Reddit repost bots that I remember on here were just to stimulate growth so there’d be content for people to discuss
If you want good karma with top comments that won’t be immediately called out as stolen from another Reddit thread, maybe, since some people have got wise to that? I dunno. I’m probably giving this more brain power than I should (eta because of all the reddit repost bots in my feed lately, probably.)
My impression is that karma matters less here. But I never used reddit much and I have never used Lemmy either, so I’m a bit of an anti-expert.
I think the bots are set up by people who simply wanted to see the content. I don’t think anyone is trying to farm anything here.
Ideally they should all be tagged as bots, which would make them less problematic.
Seems like a sociopathic trait. To try and get simulated attention for themselves. Nevertheless, it might work better for them the other way around. Using a smaller community on Lemmy as a ‘test’ environment and then plagiarizing a comment to get Reddit Karma. Or a post for that matter. I am pretty sure that there are people that might do this. There probably is a lot of mods on Lemmy that might tip off mods on Reddit for this very reason.
I will admit, if I need help for an answer to a question someone is asking, I DO Google and in those results there, which are often reddit, find someone who has already asked and answered said question, so I will just paraphrase them lol.
Not jokes but useful things and TOMT searches. Why reinvent the wheel?
Why reinvent the wheel?
I remember that one time Michael Stevens of Vsauce talks about different shaped wheels, lol.
“After all, we aren’t going to reinvent the wheel, or are we?” Lol
That’s the bad thing about social media. If no one was doing it before, someone is now!
Jokes aside it’s possible, but with the current LLMs I don’t think there’s really a need for something like that.
Malicious actors usually try to spend the least amount of effort possibile for generalized attacks, because you end up having to often restart when found out.
So they probably just feed an LLM with some examples to get the tone right and prompt it in a way that suits their uses.
You can generate thousands of posts while Lemmy hasn’t even started to reply to one.
If you instead want to know if anyone is taking all the comments on lemmy to feed to some model training… Yeah, of course they are. Federation makes it incredibly easy to do.
