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Is it just me, or is Lemmy starting to have a spam problem? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 2 years ago by ClassicallyCommie@lemmy.ml to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

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Perhaps this isn't new, as I've only been on Lemmy for around 3 months, but up until this point I hadn't noticed spam, advertising, scams, etc at all on Lemmy. However, within the last 2 days I've seen at least 3 examples of obvious spam posts, made by accounts clearly dedicated to that purpose. Has anyone else noticed this? And are there steps we could take to counter it (perhaps a report button)?

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[–] CHEFKOCH@lemmy.ml -1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (11 children)

Define spam, advertising, scams, etc.

Practical everything is an ad, info or notice what you post because you want to make people aware of things. There are some ads here but they quickly getting reported, reported myself lots of things already, it is normal.

Maybe link the examples or report them otherwise this is hard to understand what exactly you mean.

Edit Down-vote after 3 seconds, wow...

[–] QuentinCallaghan@sopuli.xyz 1 points 2 years ago (10 children)

This is a good example of spam: an account makes several posts like these to wrong communities. The post is a blatant ad for some assignment help website with link included (of course I didn't put the whole post here).

[–] CHEFKOCH@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 years ago (4 children)

Yeah, this is sadly something that will never be entirely fixed in social media. Twitter fights this by enforcing a telephone number to avoid bot posts and even then there are ways to bypass it.

Just report it and hope the mods, admins see that and ban such people, I think those are bot accounts.

[–] ClassicallyCommie@lemmy.ml 0 points 2 years ago (2 children)

I wasn't aware there already was a report button, guess I should have checked before posting :/ Hopefully reporting it for admins to handle should be enough to counter the problem for now. For that solution to scale well as Lemmy grows, I'd imagine Lemmy would have to expand by adding new instances that each stay relatively small rather than consolidating users on a handful of instances, otherwise large instances would be overrun by spam without more drastic measures in place.

[–] LLVMcompile@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

The bots are custom made, because there is no nofollow attribute. 90% of the spam will basically disappear if and when its implemented (from experience running web blogs)

[–] Thann@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 years ago

I feel like some links shouldnt have it still. Maybe just links to Lemmy instances? Whitelist/blacklist?

[–] CHEFKOCH@lemmy.ml 0 points 2 years ago

I came up with a proposal to restrict communities bases on some conditions, account age, overall posts etc. They said they look into it.

This would be the only way to prevent spam without enforcing phone number.

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