Reddit if full of bots: thread reposted exactly the same, comment by comment, 10 months later

My understanding of how this works is that that left one is real accounts making real comments, at least in the majority.

Then when the link gets reposted, either by a bot or naturally, potentially depending on the title, the bots scrape the old comments and post them.

It's content farming. And Reddit is probably okay with this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory

I didn’t believe this when I first heard about it but it’s looking more true everyday

They lost so many users they needed the "engagement" numbers for the IPO so they opened the flood gate. Now they are stuck with an issue they can't fix without admitting the fraud.

Never trust a default username

[adjective] [noun] [3-4 digits] is always a sign of bad news, on social media and Xbox Live

Reposts has always been a major issue on reddit, there are an infamous moderator who would delete posts with traction and repost it himself for karma.

Using bots to duplicate comments on reposts is a new low though.

We use manual approval for programming.dev accounts where there is a very simple instruction you must follow to be approved. The amount of spam that fails that test makes me concerned about the amount of bots from instances without any barriers for account creation.

What happens on reddit (in regards to spam) will inevitably finds its way to ActivityPub link aggregators like lemmy.

That's been happening for ages. I'm sure if you check the profiles you'll find other posts with all the same bots commenting. A lot of lazier ones wait exactly a year to repost, and it's pretty obvious in subs for something like a live service game where they'll be reposting complaints that are way out of date. One in the Monster Hunter sub reposted a trailer for Iceborne which had been out for 3 years by that point.

I'm mildly annoyed the recent thread is on the left not the right, but this is super interesting so thanks for sharing! 🤖

shit like this was happening before the exodus, you'd go into one thread then the other where it's crossposted, and it's the same comment, but with some dot, commas in weird places and it's a reply to another comment and doesn't really makes sense.

oh and youtube comments are full of nonsensical AI convos that like recommend financial advisors, or coins to invest in, like bruh

Give them some credit. They've finally changed the user name generator to random words instead of Adjective_Noun_####.

Just paid a visit. It’s really gotten bad. Horrible titles that make little sense. People falling over each other to make tired quips instead of conversation, and the rest to point out how someone is wrong or one-up the commenter.

Just said on a Reddit r/worldnews' thread that the subreddit has been astroturfed for years, as a response to someone wondering how could people in the comments be wishing for more innocent Palestinians be killed, and surprise surprise, I got instabanned. The site is becoming a façade of a fake reality in far more ways than one.

Lmao! Dead internet theory!

r/FluentinFinance is just five different accounts made less than a year ago that reposting the same political twitter screenshots with the exact same titles that all get boosted to the front page every time. Idk if everyone there is too caught up in arguing the same points they made a week ago to notice or if everyone who eventually finds out gets banned.

A strange thing on reddit is that if you make a new account and then make a comment that gets like 8 down votes then that new account gets shadow banned.

They've implemented so many rules that it encourages new users to act in the same way as the hive mind. Where even if you are an actual user then you are indistinguishable from a bot. Basically you've become a living NPC.

It's a good thing Lemmy isn't popular enough to have bots and propagandists posting here with less moderation than Reddit...

...Right?

I've noticed that many Reddit users with the username format Word_Word_Number (for example Absolute_Bot_1230) are almost guaranteed to either be a bot or extremely inflammatory -- it's like everything they post is meant to generate controversies.

Would be even hard to detect now that AI can write the same message in different ways. I question every comment I read, especially the ones appealing to one’s emotions.

The internet is full of bots, Reddit is no exception. Believe it or not, neither is Lemmy.

Thank god this isn't a problem here

P░ U░S░S░ Y░I░ N░B░I░O ░

Lemmy is not immune to this!! We need to develop FOSS to mitigate/detect that

I feel really bad for this person. This is what engagement looks like.

Not just Reddit every website I go to now I see this. Even on official game forums like World of Warcraft. Using to promote content or advertise in a way that tries to be organic.

Another settlement needs our help. I'll mark it on your map.

Nobody uses reddit. The exodus did more damage than people thought. This doesn't surprise me.

IMO the only way to not be infected by bot content is to not be popular, or small enough to be irrelevant.

How the fuck is this even possible?

*Does this have to be done by Reddit itself? That's the only way I can think of, but I really have no idea how it works.

To be fair, I sound like a bot sometimes.

Yeah, I've seen that a bunch of times. Some subredits seem to be a particularly popular places to karma-farm to make convincing sock-puppet accounts to sell. Often someone in the thread points out that it is a bot repost - but the fake post and fake comments are easier to engage with compared to the accusation that someone is a karma-farming bot.

(And of course, these bots-in-training will upvote each other's comments and posts... so it always looks pretty popular.)

Thank you. That is the day when I'll finally stop using Reddit. I never have thought that bots write that realistically, so thank you for proving it.

This is incredible. Like, it was always obvious from a gut feeling or seeing comments reposted in the exact same thread, but this makes it even more obvious.

That's why you ignore all comments from usernames that are like the default ones. Has been that way for a long time, tbh.

I will use Reddit for real search results sometimes, but I'm done reading it in general and here is partly why.

WTF ?

Lemmy will be full of bots too if it grows big enough. Enjoy the fleeting moment

Been happening a lot longer than you imagine. I stopped using Reddit when the third party apps got shut down. At least the last year of my time there was calling out repost bot accounts. Threads like that on smaller subs with week moderation were really common.

Even on some better moderated subs, they got through.

Reddit died for me a long time ago.

Dead internet.

fuck reddit

Is there a Reddit submission with this screenshot? I wanna read the reactions.

Willing to bet there was an original that was functionally repurposed for duplication and bot farming. Who knows how many of these identical threads are floating around in other channels?

This happens everywhere there, and if you complain the just say “you’re a bot!” Or “Reddit is for discussion” … place is a shithole

has someone reached out to u/A-Seashell to let them know they’ll never get an answer :’(

I more and more think that the only way to manage online community is via invites. There are major downsides (difficulty of bootstrapping and reduced anonymity) but it gives a way to combat this. If a significant number of the users you have invited are bots you get your invite privileges revoked (or you get banned). It creates a chain of accountability and you can ban as high as necessary to severe the corrupted branch.

I saw it a lot but didn't know it was the comments too.

Should be illegal, this website needs to disappear once and for all.

I hope someone will create an extension to flag them

8 years ago, reddit released a list of the "most reddit-addicted cities," and the number 1 spot was a US Air Force Base. Then reddit pulled the list when they realized that they had accidentally revealed a US gov astroturf operation.

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

Anyway, I wonder who's making all these bots