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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and you see the patterns (or, shall I say used to) - I've left Reddit to only one niche hobby now so my experience is out of date by a year or so (i.e. not aware of the "AI bot" revolution patterns).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.