this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2023
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Reddit Migration
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Let's face it, they already had it on some of the big default subs as well.
I went though a phase of bot hunting, and it was not unusual to find comment chains of 3 bots replying to each other near the top of big threads, sometimes with a hapless human or two in the mix.
They use snippets of comments from downthread (and usually downvote their "donor" comments to lower visibility) so it seems kind of organic. Sometimes they use a thesaurus or something and re word it somewhat.
What was really sad was when you'd see a human writing screeds of long arguments in reply to them.
Considering most of reddit's comments are either one-liners and jokes, it's not that hard to get upvotes as a bot... but how'd you spot one? I'm afraid that I didn't learn the ability to distinguish between bot and human.
I think some people just assume people they disagree with are bots.
No it was nothing like that, I'm talking about obvious bots.
Not sure what it's been like since the blackout but it used to be if you reported a bot its account was normally deleted by admin within about 20 minutes.
Expand the comments and do a little ctrl+f searching. The bots tend to copy a comment, post it as their own (verbatim or slightly reworded), then have their fellow bots downvote the original and upvote the bot comment. You can also see in a new but reposted thread, the top few comments are exactly the same as a previous repost.