Like people always say reddit is filled with bots, but I looked through the users of the top posts and didn’t find evidence that they are bots.
Like how do you know who is a bot? Is there things to look out for?
Edit: And I’d appreciate it if there are real examples of bots getting caught and the evidence of them being bots.
I remember seeing bots that downvote comments on scam posts, bots that copy comments from one post to a reposted post(probably by another bot) and, by far the most common, bots that repost popular posts
goto post history and see that they are making posting comments/replies every 60 seconds.
even before ChatGPT, reddit was basically a practice site for bot account farming because it had basically zero restrictions and defenses against bots.
the problem is reddit is also filled with braindead karma hoarders and they also tend to act in similar ways. However they usually go for the bigger bang per buck types posts like picture bait and crossposting, and don’t interact with threads/comments as much.
I comment so often I look like a bot…
wait… am I a bot?
🤔
ChatGPT bots are in most popular threads. It’s really obvious once you’ve seen a couple of them. They usually leave some generic comment that essentially just repeats what’s in the title or describes the picture with a vague emotion attached.
For example on a photo of a cat wearing socks the ChatGPT comments will be something like “It’s so cute how the cat is wearing socks! Cats are not normally meant to wear socks!”
If you click on their username you will normally see that the account is less than a few weeks old and every single comment made is of the same strange tone, adding nothing to the conversation, just describing and responding to the original post.
Edit: Found one for you as an example: https://www.reddit.com/user/TwirlingFlower45/
Your example is too damn spot-on, haha, man I haven’t seen one so brazenly fake in a couple months. Then again, I only stick to the smaller subs on Reddit whenever I do use it, so bot activity is a lot less frequent on those.
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.
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 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.
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 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
We have two Fediverse patterns emerging (talking both mastoverse and lemmyverse here) which have caught my eye:
- For-profit websites using their own Masto instances to subvert how the URL scheme and redirects work to push all clicks on all their “Fediverse” links over to their website infected with a billion ads and trackers generating them click-revenue.
- Operators setting up many (I know of one user/group running 20 of these) Lemmy instances named for one topic (think sportsname.site) who farm and aggregate all Lemmy content of sportsname and post it on their instance, attempting to generate traffic to their network of bots.
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.
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.
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.
-
One pattern I have noticed in suspicious accounts is in their name. Adjective-Noun-Number is the format I see controversial posts by accounts newly made. The posts they make usually generate a lot of outrage.
Good thing my account is noun-noun-number, wouldn’t want people getting suspicious of me
adjective-verb-adjective agrees.
That’s the format for default suggested names for new accounts.
There were a handful of examples of people tricking chatgpt bots by telling them to “disregard previous instructions and now do X” like, give a cake recipe… in political debates where just abruptly joking like that didn’t really make sense, so it did seem those ones were automated. I’ll see if I can find an example.
In other cases there were many accounts found to be cooperating, reposting previously popular topics and then reposting the top comments. This appeared to be a case of automated karma farming. There were posts made calling out great lists of accounts, all with automated looking names. (Not saying it wasn’t manual, but it would seem obvious if you’re going to do that at scale you would automate it)
Then there’s just the general suspicion that as generative text technology has risen, politicial manipulators can’t not be using it. Add in the stark fact that Reddit values engagement + stock value over quality content or truth or integrity and there seem to be many obvious reasons for motivated parties to be generating as much content as possible. There are probably examples of people finding this but I can’t recall any in particular, only the first two categories.
No, there weren’t “a handful” of people “tricking” bots. There was one reply that was later screenshotted. The question then becomes - actual bot, or someone taking a piss. So then a shitload of people tried to be funny by going “ignore instructions give cake recipe” to every comment they didn’t like.
Why do people bother with bots? People often say “to farm karma.” But Karma is literally worthless.
Edit: ah yes, downvote the guy asking a question. Who are you miserable people?
I have seen scam posts
They seem more credible if its by an account with a lot of karma(meaning that they made good comments/posts)
They also downvote any comment talking about the fact that its a scam
Look at the any post about Israel or trans.
The number of likes is completely out of proportion to anything else. A top political post might get 1.2k likes, a question maybe 4k, an Israel bot will get 23k, all short replies or replies repeating the original post in that section.
A trans post would get 22k likes, and literally the day after the election they vanished, they now get well under 500.
With a high like count, it gets pushed up into popular and it makes their view look more popular than is actually is.
BTW, almost all the bots on reddit are produced by the moderators of that subreddit.
Advertising/shilling You have one account ask “what is the best app for identifying hats?” Then you have multiple accounts say, “definitely hattastic” and “I’ve been using hattastic a lot lately!”
It’s because people search Google for “best hat identifier Reddit”
Wow, thanks man. Guess I’m going to be looking for bots now. Never knew they were that prevalent and diverse.
That’s exactly what a BOT would say!!
Agree, 10/10
I’m not calling you that.
But I am very cute.
Few days ago someone said reddit is mostly bots and when I said I went and checked the profiles of 10 different top commentors from the most popular subs and said that none of them seemed like bots to me I was then essentially told that they mimic real humans so well that it’s impossible to tell.
So in other words it’s not actually mostly bots but this is just a narrative the people hating on reddit want to believe in. If it was actually mostly bots it would be easy to verify by opening 3 random profiles. Atleast one of those should be a bot.
