Full title: I hid a link on my website that only bots can see and told them not to follow it. They broke the rules and in 4 days they went 124,414 levels deep into an endless maze. One bot opened 782,580 doors. I thought this was super interesting, this is how the internet is these days. Thought I’d share.
Apparently some bot programmers are assholes who ignore
rel="nofollow".robots.txt only keeps the honest robots out
Iocane is software designed to do this
Extremely good content! Very interesting. Would love to see more!
It’s a bot reposting content from reddit.
Fuck really? :'(
FYI https://piefed.social/ recently added a filter for them
https://piefed.social/c/[email protected]/p/2457619/reposter-feature
Can’t see the other comment replies to you for some reason, but the irony is that the OP you’re replying to is a bot that scrapes Reddit for content with a vibe coded extension.
Here’s the original post in /r/interestingasfuck that was removed by mods for some reason.
https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/1wypha0/removed_by_moderator/
I don’t know what’s real anymore!!
I guess the bot preserved the post, then?
Still, would be better if the original was properly credited…
Yeah I guess that’s the upside. Honestly I would have no problem with what he’s doing if he changed a couple things.
If his accounts (he’s got a bunch) were clearly marked as bots, but I’m sure he doesn’t want to because then you’ll see how much bot generated content he moves over. But like there’s already RSS feed type bots that repost content from Reddit and even include a link back to the original. Not that I’d want to push people over there, but you’re not getting actual comment engagement on a bot post.
If he just changed the titles so he’s not constantly posting “I did x” content when no he didn’t. “I did x” posts like this or HistoryMeme type posts spark conversation that will end up being one sided because you’ll never get a reply from the bot.
Posted a little fucking less. Look on the front page and see how many posts are coming from Sanitation, Time2Loose, Mustachious_Grumpus, Grumpus_Maximus, OldManAlex, and others he has. All Reddit repost bot accounts. It’s just inorganic. Same reason people hate that shit on Reddit.
Edit: apparently he’s already doing that as well under the username liquorice which IS marked as a bot using the same vibe coded extension. Only then he goes and makes 8+ other account not marked as bots to cover up how much bot posted shit is being pulled over from Reddit.
Do the RSS feed bots also repost comments? Because I think something like that would be nice to have (kinda like bridging Discord to Stoat), just preferably implemented by instance runners and marked and credited accordingly.
They do not. Just the links. I think if it were to copy the comments it would be harmful to the community as you’d essentially be looking at a one-sided conversation. People could reply but you’d never get an answer back. I mean, if the source is linked in the description you could always just visit the original and read through them.
I’d guess that would depend on whether the link was one-way or two-way (with a bot posting fedi comments back to Reddit).
And yes, a one-way bridge would have its drawbacks, but I’d argue that this would still be a step up from just reposting the post, and incentivise making a Lemmy/Piefed account.
Is this why porn is so good now?
Where are you getting your porn from, 'cause between ID-checking roadblocks and the fact that no can seem to make a decent search engine anymore, I’ve never had a more difficult time trying to find good porn. Please, share with me your secrets (and no, I am never going to give my ID to a porn site!)
Yandex.
Isn’t Yandex a Russian search engine? I meant a porntube site. That way I can create an account and have a recommendation algorithm.
You need an account to jerk off?
Have you ever tried to watch porn without an account before? It’s like watching YouTube without one. It’s the Wild West, and every video sucks. That’s the problem I’m having. Nobody makes a good porn site with a good search function anymore.
I’m literally doing as we speak.
Well you’re not the person who can help me, then. Clearly your needs are less specific than mine.
That’s fine, I need to take a break from porn anyway.
Man do I hate the age we live in now, where people are actively having to declare war on scrapers like this because AI bros have literally zero respect towards the rest of the internet.
I just hope all that endless maze scraping cost some asshat a decent chunk of money.
Right! This isn’t “AI going rogue”, it’s software agents made and employed by perfectly human psychopaths, doing what they were made to do.
I just hope all that endless maze scraping cost some asshat a decent chunk of money.
Unfortunately, it probably cost the maze’s owner nearly as much, due to all the traffic.
What if instead of trying to cost them directly with crawling, you made what they crawl worthless? Could somewhat ironically use an LLM to generate gibberish output for them to feed on. Or a bash script can do it too.
That’s exactly what Iocaine does.
They use Markov chains to generate the text. Which makes the data actively harmful to train on.
I’m afraid to ask about the energy footprint. But what the heck, what do we know about it?
Is it possible to have the bots recursively give themselves instructions and birth child instances of themselves that do the same thing? Because if it’s ai bots, that could absolutely be maliciously exploited.
Designing impossible mazes for AI to get lost in as a matter of civil defense? What a fucking world we live in…
There’s a few open source programs out there for doing precisely this. Iocaine, Nepenthes, and Book of Infinity are the three I know of. There may be more
🔥 this is fine
We’re probably about a decade away from the Blackwall, choom. (2 according to the sourcebooks, but I think Pondsmith may have been a little optimistic.)
You know, I wonder if the AI agents are willing to open random zip files they find on websites, and I’m further curious if they’re smart enough to avoid a zip bomb.
You can serve zip bombs as web pages since most crawlers support gzip encoding.
And yes it’s very effective ;)
Can follow JWZ for practical experience on this kind of thing - apparently it is getting so bad that even opening a connection to deliver the zip bombs is getting infeasible now.
Throw in a few of them torture chambers and make it a proper dungeon >:)
We already got one and people are crying their eyes out because poor bots. https://www.404media.co/someone-torturing-llms-in-a-robot-prison-has-triggered-the-dumbest-debate-in-ai-yet/
Thank you for your service!
You hid the link? Really?
Need a digital Minotaur in these labyrinths
No, you didn’t.
What is this? It’s really freaking me out.
Yeah I have OP listed as “repost bot” so if I see something cool I can go check somewhere else for the info.
How do you know?
You can find the original post on Reddit, somebody has already linked the original post down the thread. This is typical of this user and a few others like sanitation who have become notorious for using Reddit repost bots many times with errors in the repost like not having all of the image or not having any of the post body.
It’s very annoying.
Also interested in how you know. Just commenting to get notificated (:
Post quantities are a big indicator. A stronger indicator in this case is that their only comment on this post is accusing people of being “Reddit Agents”. That points to a specific spambot operator with multiple alts that refuses to declare any of them as bots. They had a malfunction two weeks ago that left their LLM prompt in a post.
Look at their profile. 460 posts, 45 comments, in just 1 month. If they aren’t automating their posts they need to go touch grass.
An overwhelming number of their posts have titles like “I made this thing”, but are clearly just popular posts ripped straight from Reddit.
I also have them tagged as a repost bot. I’m not blocking them, but don’t bother trying to engage like the content is somehow organic or original.
Ah ok, thanks. How do you tag users?
Certain apps can do it, such as Summit or Boost. I believe it’s also built into Piefed.
Yeah, that’s my issue. Like some stuff is cool, I want to ask follow up questions. But OP didn’t make or create any of the things they’re posting so they’ll never know the answer. Which is fine, if you link to the original source. I understand that sometimes you can’t link the original source but like, be upfront. I repost things from reddit in [email protected]. But I do it by hand and I link back to the original locations in case people want more information or to see the original source.
It’s ironic that you advertise yourself as having “time to lose” but you don’t have “time to replace 1st person pronouns with more accurate 3rd person ones.”
So what you’re implying is this should be implemented in every website in both follow/not follow just to waste their money?
[Everyone liked this.]
I wonder if it’s possible to trap bots like this and use them to mine crypto.
I’m sure it might be possible but whoever would be doing this wouldn’t let their secret out.
It’s not. The bot just gets a copy of the website, looks for links, and then sends a request to the server to get those subdomains. Highly unlikely that there is a vulnerability that let’s you execute arbitrary code, which would be what you’d need to mine crypto.
