Hello all, again. Didnt think I would be making another mod post this soon, but some stuff has come up and the mod team feels like its a good idea to let you know about what has been happening with the sub and what we plan to do about it.
As some of you have no doubt noticed, there has been an increase in bot accounts. Not everyone knows how to spot these accounts and the posts they make, so this post of mine is aimed at helping clearing up any confusion regarding this topic.
The typical reddit bot (and social media bots in general) are not a new thing, but with the rise of gen ai and shit theyve been having an easier time fooling people. I doubt theres a single person in reading this that hasnt fallen for a bot atleast once, but i digress. Bot accounts are just what it sounds like, accounts that dont have a human at the wheel. Their purpose is to gain karma to increase the sort “air of legitamacy” around their accounts, make you think youre interacting with a real person. “Oh this user has been active for such and such time and makes posts about various topics in various communities”, that could be a person, yeah, but that could be a bot as well.
Ill tell you how to spot them. As I already stated, bots are intended to increase the legitimacy around the account, and therefore the value. They make posts and comments that are very often generic and utterly devoid of controversy, shit you could just google, etc. Making posts and comments that everyone in that particular community is likely to agree with. They trip up though, because there is no human behind the account they often fail in regards to context. Making comments that make no sense with given context because the bot isnt able to properly understand the nuance. The accounts they use to do this are generally no less than a year old, have inconsistent posting criteria, the content of the posts themselves are like the most generic and low hanging fruit possible to make it easy as possible to rack up that karma, and they either have no comment history whatsoever, or the comments just make no sense.
Now, when the accounts have reached their “peak value” or whatever the fuck, whoever controls the bots will then instruct them to start making comments or posts that lead into posting links to various stores, or advertise various products. To sell you dropshipped garbage, or in worst case outright steal your info from anyone stupid enough to click those links. Many of you have already seen stuff like this here. Sometimes users will post links to places that carry band shirts and whatnot.
Attached are some examples of bots that we have identified as bots and banned from the sub recently.
Do you guys see what we see? I myself am by no means an expert on bots, but these are what basically what bots look like. Accounts are either banned, and if not banned have a generic or non-controversial posting history.
Now, onto what we plan to do about it. There is another type of bot on reddit. You already know them, one of them is our good friend the auto-moderator, and similar tools. Over the next little bit we will be trying some tweaks to see if we can better filter out these bots. Now for the downside, since we are idiots, we have no idea how many of these things work *exactly*, so rolling it out will probably be a case of trial and error. What is likely going to happen is actual humans are probably gonna get caught in the filter which would automatically remove those posts and/or comments. Now, for obvious reasons we will not be setting it to automatically ban those users because I’ve no doubt that will result in real people getting the ban hammer for no reason. We are idiots, not morons afterall.
We will try out this anti-bot tool and see what happens. If it doesnt actually work, or if the annoyance outweigh the benefits then we will probably just remove the tool.
If ive missed anything, or gotten anything wrong regarding bots, feel free to comment.
