I’ve noticed quite a few top posters that are using LLMs or other software to repost news links and images, probably from Reddit, onto a bunch of specific forums. They don’t identify as bot accounts, but they are fairly easy to spot because they are posting a steady stream of posts, around 2-3 posts an hour, 24/7. No sleep periods, just constant posts, at an unnatural rate.
Here’s a few examples I’ve found:
- @Grumpus_Maximus@thelemmy.club - Joined 2 months ago, 1.69K posts, sole moderator of Build A PC Sales@lemmy.world, steady stream of posts without sleeping, only posts on 4 different forums
- @sanitation@lemmy.today - Joined 2 months ago, 1.3K posts, steady stream of posts without sleeping, only posts on 5-6 different forums
- @beep@piefed.world - Joined 3 months ago, 2K posts, moderator of 15 different forums only on piefed.world, also a hidden moderator of Beep—Meta@piefed.world (yes, with an emdash) with zero posts and zero users, seems to try to evade detection by having some posting breaks in-between
Keep an eye on these kind of posters, and report them when you see them.
Im tempted to code a solution in piefed/lemmy so community moderators can put rules in place for max number of posts per day. Comics got tremendously better when they implemented the max 2 a day posts. Or maybe instance wide as well?
It made it so communities were not overrun with posts/bots.
It would probably be easiest to do that with an automod bot… but I don’t think there are many benefits to it. After all don’t we want there to be a lot of content and engagement so that this place can become a good place to find information, interaction and entertainment?
I often post more than 2 posts per day to the same community simply because more than one interesting and relevant thing about the community’s topic happened on the same day. When I post the first one, I can’t yet predict how many more there will be on the same day, so can’t yet prioritize in order to not exceed the limit.
I think thats why it would be an opt in or moderator service. Like a dropdown or something that a mod can pop in, set for a time, then remove when people behave.
If a subset of users are posting say once ever 10 minutes, it floods the system/community pretty badly. Regardless if its lemmy/piefed/etc…etc… Ive seen comics get flooded a couple of times from people (probably in good nature) post the ENTIRE comic (hundreds of posts) in a couple days time. It makes new very difficult to manage until the mods would come in.
Comments dont typically have the same issues, so I think posts should be were we draw the line. But again the way I see it, it will be optional and a tool to mitigate a user from posting too many posts per day in one community.
An Auto-mod tool might be good to start with? Not sure. Last time I messed with piefed and lemmy, piefed was easier to hook into the code and lemmy was easier on the API side. So the auto-mod tool could possibly start working on lemmy? I dunno, its been a while. Im probably going to try piefed first and see what works on my small instance.
All conjecture until I find the time/motivation.