Dang, I agree with and appreciate your moderation approach here and I completely agree with most of what you said. IME the last 18 months or so I’ve been here, this has been a welcome bastion against typical bot/campaign activity. Nowhere in the web seems safe the last ~dozen years. Most of what I’ve written here applies to my research of foreign bot activity on social networks, particularly in election years, in which you can far more easily piece together associations between accounts and narratives and writing style and piece together a lot more dots than on a site like this - and conclude very definitively that yes, this is a bot.

My original comment was just meant to chime in that, in the wild the last ten years, I’ve encountered an extraordinary amount of this kind of activity (which I confirmed - I really do research this stuff on the side and have written quite a lot about it) - that would support credibility to anyone that felt they experienced bot activity on this site. I haven’t done a full test on this site yet, because I don’t think it’s allowed, but at a glance I suspect particular topics and keywords attract swarms of voting/downvoting stuff, which you alluded to in your post. I think the threshold of 500 upvotes to downvote is a bit low, but clearly to me what you are doing is working. I’m only writing all of this out to make it very clear I am not making any criticisms or commentary about this site and how it handles bots/smurfs/etc.

Most of my research centers around 2016,2020 political cycles. Since the invention, release, and mass distribution of LLM’s I personally think this stuff has proliferated far beyond what anyone can imagine right now, and renders most of my old methods worthless, but for now that’s just a hypothesis.

Again, I appreciate the moderation of this site, it’s one of the few places left I can converse with reasonably intelligent and curious people compared to the rest of the web. Whatever you are doing, please keep doing it.