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Is there any proof behind the idea that "reddit is filled with bots"?
(lemmy.dbzer0.com)
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this post was submitted on 25 Nov 2024
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No Stupid Questions
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No such thing. Ask away!
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I've seen two bot patterns (called out by the users themselves in context) in years of using reddit; both rely on the bot accounts having karma-farmed the system (and these include adding to their karma farm):
(a) Repost-bots: they take a good image content post from some time ago which may not have been popular at the time, or posted in a more niche subreddit, and repost it as their own content in a popular subreddit a period of time later, using very specific timing to hit their target audience. Commenters call this out but a lot of folks just click on images and upvote and don't read comments (memes, etc.), so the accounts tend to have longer lifespans.
(b) Comment-bots: they are similar to the above, but instead farm good content comments which have low or few upvotes (typically because the comment was posted "too late" in a thread, timing is everything when posting on a massively read thread - first in gets the upvotes so to speak). These get called out as well by other commenters more successfully and people start to block those accounts, so I see the comment farm bot accounts rotate frequently and have short lifespans. You see this in a lot of News articles.
Sorry no examples on hand, but spend enough time and you see the patterns (or, shall I say used to) - I've left Reddit to only one niche hobby now so my experience is out of date by a year or so (i.e. not aware of the "AI bot" revolution patterns). $0.02 hth
Edit: I should note that not all bot accounts are bad, my niche hobby has a subreddit specific bot (think like an IRC channel bot) which farms the upstream vendor content (website, twitter, youtube, etc.) and posts in the subreddit for everyone's benefit. This type of bot is clearly labeled as a bot and approved by the admins of the subreddit, just like iRC.
The comment bots were funny. They would just copy a comment someone made, and then make the same exact comment in the very same post. So they usually got called out a lot.
I saw some start to combine two comments into one before reddit shut down api. Who knows what they're doing now.
We have two Fediverse patterns emerging (talking both mastoverse and lemmyverse here) which have caught my eye:
Names withheld to protect myself from getting griefed.
I haven’t seen sports content being taken by bots to another Lemmy instance, but I have seen an instance that was trying to be the home for sports fans across a variety of sports, with pre-built communities for most North American pro teams and a lot of college sports, at least Power 5 conferences. Some of those teams had more active communities elsewhere, but I liked the general idea of having a home instance focused on one topic. In general it doesn’t seem like there are enough Lemmy users yet for a lot of these teams to build a vibrant, active community the way Reddit did. There’s been some better luck just with general leagues or sports communities.
I used to see bots posting comments that were copied verbatim from Hacker News -- which was really obvious because of the "[1]" style footnoting they do on HN that rarely made sense on reddit where you could just use markdown to add descriptive links inline.
I reported a whole bunch of those, but no one ever seemed to do anything about them, and I eventually gave up. Been over a year since I've interacted significantly with reddit though, and I'm similarly in the "who knows what they're doing now" camp. Wouldn't surprise me if there are bots reposting comments scraped from lemmy to karma farm on reddit now too.
There’s some like that on here but they also clearly identify themselves as bots posting the RSS feed from Hacker News or other sites, which seems fine to me
I usually saw the comment theft bots take the top reply to a top comment, then most it as a parent-level comment. Yes, if I saw them, it was probably late enough to have a few comments calling it out. They still got engagement and still got a few hundred upvotes before it was obvious, so it worked all the same: high karma and seemingly organic comments in their history
I never tossed my Reddit account when I left, so I still get notified of replies to my posts and comments; I’d say there’s a third type of bot - an “engagement bot” that takes high karma comments on old posts and replies to them in a manner that adds nothing but could trigger the original commenter to reply.
At first I thought it was actual people, but it’s always young accounts with high post volumes, all the same type of post that nobody who had actually read the original thread would have written. And the accounts seem to target high karma comments, and aren’t limited to any particular subreddit.
I mentioned I had several replied to years-old comments I made when I landed in a tech support thread after not using reddit for a year. Someone replied (to the Lemmy comment) saying Reddit changed the way comment threads are viewed. Logging out, I could see they were right...
Reddit will now only show about half the thread without clicking the expand button. Instead, it fills that space with "related posts" using the world's worst algorithm. Post age doesn't matter - in my case, a post about the patch notes for a game I don't play anymore had recommended a post about the state of the game 6 years ago in which I commented
[EDIT] My anecdote is NOT saying Reddit bots aren't real.
I have to admit; I suspect that some of the Reddit bots are calling from inside the company.
There's karma farm bots to sell to companies for astroturfing but yes, Reddit absolutely runs their own bots to fluff engagement metrics
Before the API event, I was already considering leaving reddit. I had been there for ~12 years at that point, and I swear every 5th post was an identical repost in a different sub of something that was popular 6mo - 2yr ago. Then the top comments in the reposted threads were always the same. For the last year or so before I left, the main feeling reddit brought me was annoyance. Then they decided to force people onto the main reddit app.. personally I don't feel the need to view ads while already dealing with the repost bullshit, such a bad experience.
The repost bots often use oddly-phrased headlines -- often commenters will even talk about how weird the headline is. I can’t tell if the posters are actually bots, or if they are content farmers from certain countries. (The odd phrasing may sound natural in their language.)
Another tactic is to post an obviously incorrect headline to draw engagement, like mis-identifying a picture of the Empire State Building as Chicago.
Both of these happen frequently with image posts.