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Reddit astroturfing firms and bot farms learned to buy/use “seasoned” accounts over a decade ago. I’d venture there have been countless bots just in a holding p
by transcriptase 4mo ago
Reddit astroturfing firms and bot farms learned to buy/use “seasoned” accounts over a decade ago. I’d venture there have been countless bots just in a holding pattern harmlessly building up reputation and a human-like history of posts across different subs etc just to eventually be either activated or sold to someone else to “burn”
- 10xDev 4mo agoSo what is the comment frequency of these bots? There must be some signal in the activity even if the comments themselves pass the turing test.
- jayd16 4mo agoDoes it matter? With enough you can just have them upvote each other.
- transcriptase 4mo agoEven if there was, I doubt Reddit cares enough to go after them when it’s boosting their valuation
- Rebelgecko 4mo agoIf you find one account you can find a few dozen spam accounts by building a graph of what posts they reply to
- dns_snek 4mo agoMost of them have private profiles these days
- Rebelgecko 4mo agoThere are alternate sources that index reddit comments, but it's really frustrating how easy it would be for Reddit to shut the most prolific bots down if they were so inclined
- arjie 4mo agoI recently spotted one unmistakable example of this[0]. It’s been a trick for many years now that duplicating a human post and its comments is a good way to appear human but this was quite the example. 0: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2026-01-06/Is_The_Internet_Dead%3F https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2026-01-06/Is_The_Inter...
- pessimizer 4mo ago> duplicating a human post and its comments is a good way to appear human Also just repeating something from the linked article, but often with different wording and in a tone that makes it seem like it was something that the article missed.
- teraflop 4mo agoIt used to be super common that when you spotted a bot post and clicked through to the user's history, you'd see very average, human-looking activity from years ago, followed by a long gap of inactivity, and then a flurry of obvious bot comments. It's very obvious that these accounts were abandoned and then either bought from their original owners, or more likely bought from someone who compromised them, because of their history and karma. And I would bet money that Reddit is well aware of this phenomenon, because not long after it became so common as to be impossible to ignore, they papered over it by allowing users to hide their history from public view. (AFAIK subreddit moderators can still see it, but typical users now have much less ability to see whether they're interacting with actual humans.)
- transcriptase 4mo agoThat and locking down the API meant no more sites offering readily available visualizations of this type of thing
- ishouldstayaway 4mo ago> allowing users to hide their history from public view Yeah it's become my default assumption that any user who does this is either a bot or a bad-faith troll.