No Stupid Questions

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and you see the patterns (or, shall I say used to) - I've left Reddit to only one niche hobby now so my experience is out of date by a year or so (i.e. not aware of the "AI bot" revolution patterns).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

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/

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.

Maybe start here: https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnUselessTalents/comments/15tzjkb/how_to_identify_bots_on_reddit/

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.

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.

I don’t know about proof but when you spend lots of time on a platform you naturally start to notice patterns.

There was an essence of superficiality that permeated a lot of the content that I consumed on Reddit, even the niche subreddits.

For example, on the movie or video gaming subreddits people would often ask for recommendations and I noticed a lot of the top comments were single word answers. They’d just say the name of the movie or game. There was no anecdote to go along with the recommendation, no analysis, no explanation of what the piece of media meant to them.

This is a single example. But the superficiality is everywhere. Once you see it, it’s very hard to unsee it.

The easiest way is to look at what comes up in /new. You'll see copycat subreddits pop up and suddenly be full of reposts filled with accounts saying bland replies. Usually mundane things like copies of r/aww. Click on the accounts themselves and look at their activity. It's subreddits of bots replying to bots. They do that until they reach a certain maturity then likely get sold to advertisers and propagandists

https://old.reddit.com/r/Blackout2015/comments/4ylml3/reddit_has_removed_their_blog_post_identifying/

A pretty obvious indicator of bot behavior is that they'll repost old comments from reposted threads to generate a fake history.

Reddit's admins don't do anything about it because it creates the appearance of activity, and presumably they get some kind of kickback for not doing anything about US govt astroturfing.

https://archive.ph/20160327060128/http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2014/07/pentagon-admits-spending-millions-study-manipulate-social-media-users.html

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.

There are some subs on Reddit dedicated to finding botnets on Reddit.

By now, there are a wide variety of reasons to have a botnet, mainly tied to curating some public opinion.

remember that r/mademesmile debacle?

or them countless threads that are all reposted comment by comment by different accounts.

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