Ya know, I thought about it for a second, and YOU may not do that stuff on the fediverse, but what’s stopping an instance from offering those services? Could the average person modding a community or even an admin really tell if the sudden up-welling of support for a post is organic or not? We’ve all seen a bot or two here on lemmy, but the other day I saw what looked like a large (25-50% of the replies) amount of bots on a post. The replies just looked… off, like slightly off topic while randomly dropping in bits of the post. So that would mean both ‘active’ and ‘hot’ can be gamed by people if they really wanted.
Ya know, I thought about it for a second, and YOU may not do that stuff on the fediverse, but what’s stopping an instance from offering those services? Could the average person modding a community or even an admin really tell if the sudden up-welling of support for a post is organic or not? We’ve all seen a bot or two here on lemmy, but the other day I saw what looked like a large (25-50% of the replies) amount of bots on a post. The replies just looked… off, like slightly off topic while randomly dropping in bits of the post. So that would mean both ‘active’ and ‘hot’ can be gamed by people if they really wanted.