zenmonkey wrote:I’m concerned that Covid and isolation has rendered many of our members operating with paranoid filters.
It's not paranoia, it's a detectable pattern.
Are people detached from reality now buying into a pascalian simulacrum?
Not sure what that means
The bots are probably more active on Reddit or FB groups than a forum that requires “human handlers”
The activity of bots is why we've been getting forced to log back in and answer captchas for years here.
We've had a rash of clone-post bots here in the past.
We're on phpBB, which is possibly the most common forum software online, so easy to design reusable bots for.
Quora doesn't seem to be quite as bad for this as it used to be, so it may be that their algorithm has picked up the pattern from the downvotes and learned to stop promoting this type of question, and the bot operators have moved on.
vs people who post, see that they aren’t getting an answer and don’t really come back because a) it’s hard to log in b) the place isn’t exactly central station of feedback, c ) the email system doesn’t send out notifications.
It's not a matter of one or the other though -- we've got both. This is why I propose just asking questions. For the human who's going to come back, it's actively encouraging them to participate; for the human who never comes back, it's irrelevant; for the bot, it means not getting the answers they're attempting to harvest, and perhaps even knowing it (because if I was programming a bot like that, I'd probably not use responses including question marks.