Just a few years ago, you would never see such a disparity in votes vs comments. But these days, this is pretty much the norm. I've seen posts with 10K+ upvotes and no more than 80 comments.
I'd say in about 2 years, the entire place is going to be bots with AI generated content that try to mimic "real users" using their new Dynamic Product Ads tool. Not sure how that's legal as I thought ads needed to be marked or differentiated from regular content, but here we are.
The future looks bleak and AI even bleaker. Because it's going to be used against us to make the rich richer and not to make our lives better.
What will stop bots from coming here? Registration filters and user reports?
Bots are already proliferating the fediverse. Kbin is constantly spammed with "buy online drugs here" links. Transparent bots (those that are tagged as bots) try to boost engagement by reposting things from Reddit, but are still perpetuating one of the worst aspects of reddit even if they're being upfront about it. AI generated articles posted on obvious junk websites are constantly being spammed by the same accounts.
It's a difficult problem to solve.
One thing I noticed the other day, while banning one such bot, is that the same network has been posting on Reddit as well.
Turns out the Reddit ones have been posting the spam for months, while the Lemmy ones get banned within hours.
Part of that is the lower volume of content here, but part of it is also the great people that take the time to report bad content ♥️
I always report. However, I heard that the report only goes to the admin of your instance. Maybe future releases will support cross instance reporting and the ability for admins to "trust" bans by admins from other instances.
I'm fuzzy on the details, but I do get reports from users on another instance as long as it's "relevant" (ex. in one of our communities, one of our users)
Banning a foreign user on our instance will fix the problem for our instance, but they need to be banned on the home instance too in order to stop the spam from continuing
Does ActivityPub report back bans to the user's home instance? I could see a moderation tool that let the admin autoban their users if enough federated instances had banned them.