this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2023
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Bots usually post to their own user page/subreddit to my knowledge.
Depends on the bot. There are many that go into subreddits and repost old popular posts. Sometimes in subreddits you wouldn’t think of. Like, for some reason the King Of The Hill subreddit had a really bad reposting bot infestation. I guess those wholesome and kind of niche but moderately active subs are chosen because people are less likely to dig into it, but if you check on the post history it becomes clear it’s an account with no comments that is just reposting content back into subs.
Is this a restriction on bot activity? I guess it would make sense for non-malicious bots using the API, but there's nothing stopping writing a malicious bot just using the website scraping and automation to post anywhere. At least I never had to fill out a captcha, but there's possible there are measure against these kind of bots as well.
Depends on the bot and its target subs. Some subreddits are set up to restrict posting below a certain karma line, so bots aimed at those will do stuff like posting to their own profile—to get around, say, a moderation tool that'll auto-ban accounts that post in "free karma subreddits"—to build up the needed karma to post wherever. Those are the ones I assume @Kay_Angel is thinking of
But, a bot that's aimed at a less restrictive community wouldn't need to jump through the hoops so would work a lot more directly.