I lean heavily towards both flavours of (b), but it's probably "all of the above".
A guy I served with is now an academic "Extremism Expert" talking head, #nostr is exactly the sort of thing he'd be funded to smear, I mean, study.
And then there's every local, state and federal agency wanting its own "human terrain" / "social media analysis" unit.
Most of those bots could be glowies from less-resourced units. The ones you can't pick as bots are the Feds :-p
Do you need hundreds of bots to gather data?
If they were just gathering data why bother even having a name and profile pic?
These not accounts saying anything, ever. They're not posting anything *at all*, no replies even, nothing.
Not sure how this fits into your theory?
I want to believe tho:)
Statistical analysis requires a lot of data, from as many angles as possible, but you're right, we're approaching "The Man Who Was Thursday" territory here.
On the other hand, the funding exists, therefore it must be used, or it will be retargeted. The number of bots seems insane, but govt work be like that if the budget is there and management wants big numbers for their big meeting.
Or I could be wrong and its mostly (c). But I have no idea what (c) could be!
I'm slightly biased towards
C) ???
Cos it leaves room for speculation, paranoia and general tomfoolery:)
🤔🤔How do I rope some conspiracy theory people into this thread? nostr:npub1ezw0xm0w52rd4yfdg9zlw9qvwdy46alzelklkefptrd203m37tuq4djmeg ?
#conspiracy #conspiracies
nostr:npub1mu9wmykl7qx5llk69axd3rvk0hzhdd25jsqtj2hmnzjpn2sxum6s8jjj0t we need help please 👻🎃
nostr:npub1njst6azswskk5gp3ns8r6nr8nj0qg65acu8gaa2u9yz7yszjxs9s6k7fqx
How many bots are we talking about. I have a another theory
Hard to tell but seems like hundreds. 🤔 If you use primal the notications of new followers are always popping off with them.
But do go on.... 👀👀👀
On reddit you see hundreds of dormant accounts that will suddenly become active at the same time and all attack a particular person saying anything contrary to the hive mind. So they will not post or comment for 3-5 years and suddenly will all attack a user at once then the accounts will get deleted. Most of these are programmed with a back date of origin but on nostr I dont think you can do that.
So what im thinking is that someone is planning a troll army. One person can seem like lots of people and try to bend the narrative as they do on reddit.
just a thought
Yep, dormant bots waiting to be activated had been brought up before, but nicely fleshed out theory 👀
It could be any malicious actor, political or just an apolitical troll, prankster etc. Probably no way of tracing their origin or even knowing if/when they do get activated, in this scenario.
I suppose not making in nostr is incredibly low cost/effort, so it could be someone with grander perhaps political motivations, thinking about a 'just in case nostr gets big in the future' presence established here. Perhaps happening in all the other twitter alts too ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
