So, tangentially related to this, you know r/kitty? The subreddit where every post was a picture of a cat, and the only word permitted in the title and any comments was "Kitty"?
I'm convinced that was being used for covert communications. Run those pictures through Outguess or something.
How do you track down the sheer number of them so efficiently? You could obviously dig through each one's profile, but that wouldn't work for hundreds or thousands.
Lol. There is no way to do it efficiently. I did it in the way you described every time, and I reported literal thousands to reddit's admins (and never got a single response) and was banned by multiple subreddits because I was "annoying" when I reported bots to sub mods. I also called bots out in comments and provided evidence when I did. Nobody cared.
When reddit killed 3rd party apps, I rolled out. I didn't realize how bad reddit had become and how much I hated the site. I'm much happier here with less content and without a bot infestation. Additionally, I'm sure users, mods, and admins WOULD care if I reported that sort of thing on Lemmy
Was anybody under the impression that it wasn't just account harvesting? It's been that way for years. All of the default subs have been that way for a long time. The biggest clue is when you see the same post on multiple different subs at the same time. Just have your bot swarm upvote posts so that they take off under hot and you're good.
Yeah, although I find that even some if the subreddits for shows that are not discussed on reddit are pure trash, The Boys comes to mind since they got really explicit and conservatives realized the show is making fun of them, the discussions around episodes are just trash