Like people always say reddit is filled with bots, but I looked through the users of the top posts and didn’t find evidence that they are bots.
Like how do you know who is a bot? Is there things to look out for?
Edit: And I’d appreciate it if there are real examples of bots getting caught and the evidence of them being bots.
The comment bots were funny. They would just copy a comment someone made, and then make the same exact comment in the very same post. So they usually got called out a lot.
I saw some start to combine two comments into one before reddit shut down api. Who knows what they’re doing now.
We have two Fediverse patterns emerging (talking both mastoverse and lemmyverse here) which have caught my eye:
- For-profit websites using their own Masto instances to subvert how the URL scheme and redirects work to push all clicks on all their “Fediverse” links over to their website infected with a billion ads and trackers generating them click-revenue.
- Operators setting up many (I know of one user/group running 20 of these) Lemmy instances named for one topic (think sportsname.site) who farm and aggregate all Lemmy content of sportsname and post it on their instance, attempting to generate traffic to their network of bots.
Names withheld to protect myself from getting griefed.
I haven’t seen sports content being taken by bots to another Lemmy instance, but I have seen an instance that was trying to be the home for sports fans across a variety of sports, with pre-built communities for most North American pro teams and a lot of college sports, at least Power 5 conferences. Some of those teams had more active communities elsewhere, but I liked the general idea of having a home instance focused on one topic. In general it doesn’t seem like there are enough Lemmy users yet for a lot of these teams to build a vibrant, active community the way Reddit did. There’s been some better luck just with general leagues or sports communities.
I used to see bots posting comments that were copied verbatim from Hacker News – which was really obvious because of the “[1]” style footnoting they do on HN that rarely made sense on reddit where you could just use markdown to add descriptive links inline.
I reported a whole bunch of those, but no one ever seemed to do anything about them, and I eventually gave up. Been over a year since I’ve interacted significantly with reddit though, and I’m similarly in the “who knows what they’re doing now” camp. Wouldn’t surprise me if there are bots reposting comments scraped from lemmy to karma farm on reddit now too.
I usually saw the comment theft bots take the top reply to a top comment, then most it as a parent-level comment. Yes, if I saw them, it was probably late enough to have a few comments calling it out. They still got engagement and still got a few hundred upvotes before it was obvious, so it worked all the same: high karma and seemingly organic comments in their history
