Reddit founder Alex Ohanian says 'much of the internet is now dead.'

Interesting! Thanks for posting.

I am not a bot.

R1 = BOT!

That's Mr. Serena Williams to you!

I'm convinced we have bots here.

We do have botulism brained borderline cases.

[quote] I'm convinced we have bots here.

Yep, I'm pretty sure we do. And I don't mean Janbot.

Bots are more interesting, no?

I'm sure 98% of the anti-trans trolls are bots.

To suggest that men would want to pretend to be women so they could be sentenced to women's prisons and have free access to women's locker rooms for the sole purpose of raping women is beyond laughable. I can't believe a living, breathing human would make such a patently stupid statement.

R8 are you new here? Can you fathom the low vibration individuals who post on an unmoderated forum?

Some trolls may be bots.

The "Condi" troll/bot may be an automated bot. Put "Rumsfeld" in the search box (CondiBot posted about him) and see a bot gone wild....it posted the same thing about a dozen times.

Why would a "bot" pay to post about Condi Rice?

Facebook is definitely dead Internet.

Will no one speak for the bots?

This is sadly accurate. Just look at any YouTube comment section. The majority of the comments are likely written by bots. Reddit is becoming unusable because of how many posts are clearly not written by humans.

I don’t think DL is much of a target for bots. Why bother?

How can you tell a bot post on Reddit?

Bots abound in group chats. What is he babbling about?

The Condi troll is not a bot. That's just a troll of the variety that fixates on one weird topic comstantly. The Condi troll is just a weirdo on DL with OCD, not a bot.

Bots are programmed to spew specific viewpoints, usually divisive and political. I'd venture well over half of the anti-trans posts here are bots, because they're so repetitive, and their arguments are so basic and black and white. I get a similar vibe in the Mamdani threads, with posts after post from the same ip address (seemingly "one poster") replying to everyone about "muslims throwing gay people off of roofs." Just a complete knuckle-dragging, mouth-breathing point made over and over and over to anyone who argues with it. THAT is a bot, not some basement queen with Condoleezza Rice posters all over his cheetoh-stained bedroom.

But how would an anti-trans bot find its way to a Datalounge thread?

It makes sense to invest in programming bots for Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Reddit which are basically public facilities with millions of users

But Datalounge? Again, why bother?

Is they NY subway troll a bot or a real human?

It's always the same bullshit:

"I'm a life-long white New Yorker, always voted for Democrats, but I'm afraid to get on the subway anymore because all those scary black and brown people can't wait to pounce on defenseless little me and rob me or kill me. I can see it in their eyes. They're animals and should be put out of their misery."

Sounds like one, R20.

The "I'm a liberal democrat, but here's my opinion on a divisive topic that sounds like it's directly lifted from the most vile talking head on FOX News" schtick is 100% bot these days. The people programming bots are just conservative contrarian trolls with tech skills

Again—why?

The bigs sites have 100s of millions of users.

We have hundreds.

I don't think there is a dedicated DL bot troll, R23, but when the Russians and our oligarchs are throwing billions at manipulating public opinion, there are botsters working to scrape every last cent and they have come here. It is particularly bad leading up to elections, and there were days prior to the 2024 election that DL was unreadable.

Bots are easy to program. It's not like you need to program it for each site individually. Maybe a few lines of code are tweaked for differing authentication, login and posting procedures, but the messaging is the same. Of course DL has bots, and it doesn't matter if 10 people post here or 10 million. It's a fucking bot, a computer program that runs itself. It's not like a troll farm employing people around the clock, it can be one guy doing it over and over again on different websites.

And it's not one guy, either.

MAGA can't function without the prevalence of foreign bots. They rely on smoke and mirrors to stay in power.

Twitter is rolling out a new feature next week to combat foreign bots. It will display the country of origin for accounts. Expect a lot of the rightwing accounts to suddenly disappear.

Hardly any comments about Below Deck here on Datalounge…

The pro-Palestinian bots that post regularly seem to have gone completely silent since this past weekend. I don’t know if they have been turned off or just put on pause.

What can they say now? Hamas is executing political prisoners in the streets. Hard to blame that on the Jews. (Though I imagine they’ll think of something.)

How can I tell if I'm a bot or not?

Do you use the bathroom?

Is Miss Ohanian still married to the Lesbiana, Slit-slavering Daughter of Sappho Serena Williams?

His own site (Redditt) has a large majority of bots

[quote]Twitter is rolling out a new feature next week to combat foreign bots.

I just went on Twitter for the 1st time in a week and the only thing on my feed are people who disagree with everything I support. Essentially my entire feed is all MAGAt bullshit

R26 Cuz foreign bots have never heard of this fancy thing called a VPN I’m sure.

I was just about to say the exact same thing, R35. Even my 7 year old nephew knows to use a VPN to get access to different game apps. You don't think bot programmers know the same, R26?

Obviously Musk does not really want to get rid of right wing bots. He wants to give the appearance of doing something while doing nothing.

I would like Alex inside me quite deeply

We have quirky posters (the one obsessed with Vanessa Paradis, for example), and a few publicists (Sydney Sweeney slays on her magazine cover!) but I don’t think DL is infested by bots.

I can’t imagine why any publicist would bother with Datalounge. No offense.

R39 I'm guessing you don't go into the political threads.

Who is Vanessa Paradis?

Johnny Depp's ex, r41.

That’s why I love terrible customer service reps - I know I’m talking to a real, pissed off person who drops their headset midcall.

R28, no they're still active here

R18, how do you see that multiple posts on here are from the same ip address? Ignoredar is not reliable enough to do this and they dont appear in the page source

[quote]He wants to give the appearance of doing something while doing nothing.

This has been the goal of my life working in various offices.

Wild how the internet feels less and less alive lately. When even “proof of life” is something we have to ask for online, you know things have shifted. Maybe the next era really will be about smaller, human spaces — not open feeds. It’s no surprise group chats on apps like Signal and Discord are booming as people seek real connection away from the noise.

OK, I have too many addictions to add another, but TikTok seems to be a good app. I keep getting links to TikTok on my favorite sites, but I’m an old bitter queen and perhaps I shouldn’t invade the children’s TikTok. Perhaps I could leave them to their business.

I would love to blow Alexis.

Transwomen are men who pretend to be women. Transwomen are men and men can never be women. That's a fact about the human species, not something dependent on bots.

R47, TikTok’s algorithm is like no other. That’s why I can’t quit it.

Am I bot?

TikTok is full of bots, just like X. And Sora is about to make it even worse.

The internet was a huge mistake. I wonder what an alternate 2025, where the internet was never invented, would look like?

[Quote] [R28], no they're still active here

Nah, it’s the Pro-Zionist bots that are active here.

See how easy that is?

Actually it makes more sense than there being “pro-Palestine bots.” Most bots are set up to peddle rightwing ideology, and Zionism is rightwing:

This is why I'll always love DL.

It's *mostly* just us homos trying to make each other laugh.

Flooding a thread about bots on the internet with post after post proclaiming you're a bot in a snarky tone is 100% something bots would be programmed to do.

[quote]To suggest that men would want to pretend to be women so they could be sentenced to women's prisons and have free access to women's locker rooms for the sole purpose of raping women is beyond laughable. I can't believe a living, breathing human would make such a patently stupid statement.

r8--that's is awesome, but don't let them know what their tells are.

There's a problem with proof of life - How can I post my picture w/out my filters. It's going to read AI.

I put my VPN as Canada. I'll let you all know how well country of origin goes.

[quote] it’s the Pro-Zionist bots that are active here

Looking at the extreme pro-Palestinian replies the r53 account posted on the “Will Palestinian supporters rise up now”, it does look like it is a pro-Palestinian bot, programmed to respond to any support of Israel or criticism of the Palestinians.

R58 to be fair I dont think thats a bot, its a real person, just a woefully misunderinformed one. Ignoredar is not necessarily reliable as I suspect it works off the IP addresses of posters, which can be IP spoofed (see link) or masked with VPN's. Hence the posts of malicious actors can end up mixed in with those of entirely innocent posters

The Iranian regime have enough useful idiots doing the posting work for them. The Iranian bots here arent used so much for posting as for timing out those who post inconvenient truths. Ask me how I know..... thats why I have largely stayed silent on the thread you mentioned

Still like to know how R18 is able to see posters IP addresses

This is the only bot acceptable on DL.