Leo Wandersleb @LeoWandersleb - 9d
How to avoid spooks? I've been thinking lately about governments trying to subvert nostr or whatever censorship resistant network and I'm convinced that bots can be used to totally bend our perception of who's worth following and who's outright crazy. Bots can be used to give clout to some and take it from others. And there is not really much one can do to fight this. If Alice has deep pockets to spawn an army of bots to follow and amplify her view and discredit Bob, others will follow that dynamic at least at some rate. If most of your follows are inclined to follow Alice rather than Bob, you can't get out of Alice' clout amplification. We can curate who we follow and we can limit what we see to people we follow but unless we are hyper paranoid, we will end up following bots and spooks as clearly we want to at least see what our follows are interacting with.
They are but engagement is not irrelevant. If I constantly get replies from my bots and these replies sound smart, some of my followers will follow these reply bots eventually and they can spin narratives then. See, I just replied to some random account that might well be a bot, I gave credit to it by engaging with the argument and might get influenced by seeing you getting likes even though these are also irrelevant but clients show them with no distinction between likes from within my circle and random likes by accounts that don't have a profile or followers.
And you are a hybrid - half Danny half LLM. That's the other thing. LLMs could color our social interactions as we more and more rely on them to write anything longer than a "gm".
Uhm, ... nope. Relay operators optimize for profits and not for genuine interactions. If the bots pay the $1.5 per month, they are welcome and as long as they don't focus on gay porn and obvious spam, they are welcome to stay forever. I'm not talking about overt spam but about subtle nudging. On nostr, you can't de-platform somebody but you can make the protocol no fun for them and their followers with very subtle and cheap interventions.
Whatever. It could be accounts just lurking, spreading memes appealing to a certain demographic to then subtly spin sentiment when needed for example when more people need to care more about the next uni-party president's strong issues. "I'm just a pleb but candidate X has a point there" from enough of your follows and you start doubting your values.
How? I don't think, people will realize it's going on even if the bots put heavy weights on the scale. And then people will assume it could only happen to others but their frens are all real, genuine people that if anything have their own, personal agendas but they are not bots. I went to very few conferences and very few of those I follow are indeed humans I know I met and at least half of my follows are probably not bots according to my gut feeling but LLMs will be better at pretending to be human than most humans themselves, so at some point, the only genuine encounters will be in the real world and not online.
For now, yes but AI is advancing, so we might be interviewing ghosts soon. There are already LLM generated podcasts. jb55 did even create an "interview" with me, based on my nostr posts.
