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.

The right one is the "real" accounts. Notice how the left one is newer and all the accounts have names ending with four digits, except where they aren't copies from the right.
- No, the left one is older and most the names in the right contain four numbers.
  
  What's going on here?
  
  Maybe op updated the picture?
- The list of names at the left creeps me the fuck out.
Reddit is going to poison LLMs sooner than I thought.
- LMAO while AIs reading training data sets get stuck in infinite loops.
- Reddit probably omits bot accounts when it sells its data to AI companies
It's account farming. They make fake accounts look legitimate so they can use them to influence opinions on the site.
- They also use them in groups of 3 to lure people to malicious sites and scam sites. Especially fake merchandise sites.
Basically replaying a thread to make it look like there's activity in the sub.

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

Yeah, even if we're not quite "there" yet, it feels like we're at least moving in that direction
- Definitely depends on where you're going. Certain Hexbear posts are such obvious bot networks, while some niche communities can remember what they wrote more than two comments ago.
I have a more realistic description of "Dead Internet Theory" that involves no conspiracy theories:

The Internet is becoming a monoculture, which is killing the vibrant, diverse, resilient, innovative space it used to be. Manifestos about a better way of life, and creative personal websites have been replaced with vapid social status posts in bland bootstrap layouts that double as data collection schemes. Technology that empowers people has been replaced with technology to restrict people. Bots masquerading as people is just the cherry on the sundae, the inevitable outcome of having created such a monoculture, a place where large orchards of content are so easy to pollute. The modern Internet ducking sucks, it has been ruined by people.
Reading the Wikipedia it seems quite unlikely, but then again maybe it’s also written by a bot.
- As a human I think the Wikipedia article is correct. I'm not a bot (drinking water right now- bots cannot do this).
This gets posted all the time, and it's frustrating that it lacks any nuance.

It's just a spooky bedtime story... "imagine if everyone you talk to online is just a bot"

Yes a lot of online content is generated.

Yes it's getting worse.

Yes there's lots of bots.

However... you can choose where you spend your time online, and spend it with friends or likeminded people.

What I mean to say is, some communities on reddit are "mostly dead", but you don't have to go there.

I remember when the narwhal used to bacon only at midnight.

Now the narwhal is forced to bacon continuously.

This kills the narwhal.

🤮
Narwhallaire bacongrind moment
The narwhal bacons your data at midnight.
The pigs fly at midnight, but believe not what they say, for they tell only treacherous lies.
This.

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.

How far does it have to go before investors start to care I wonder? I somehow doubt OP is the only person capable of perceiving and documenting this.
- Where as it is shifting to a front for Gov. Psy Ops just like Xitter, investors don't matter.

Never trust a default username

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

And here I thought making a default username looking one was a good idea…
- I've switched to name generation to stay extra anonymous...
Cutesy auto generated names are too useful for bots, the lazy, and fans of cutesy name combos.

Should have made defaults your approximate IP geolocation. I’m kidding of course for privacy reasons, but a little similar motivation to think about a better name during creation couldn’t hurt (looking at Reddit here).

Edit: but hey - maybe it’s not desirable for one to be able to distinguish users. I wonder… nah, Reddit would never… 😒
- This dude is from Pennsylvania.
I don't know about that. I now stick to default names after HR told my department to help them identify some leakers on reddit.
Usually Xbox Live has XxxNAMExxX
When you use “connect with Apple” it creates an account with a name constructed this way.

You can change it afterwards but no one does.

EDIT: Wait, is it the default Reddit way?
- Yeah I think any account you create now has that as the default. Or at least did a few years ago.
  
  So it's really more of a "many new accounts are bots" rather than "you can distinguish bots by this account name format".

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.

Is it new? I got the impression that's also been going on a while.
- It's definitely not a new issue, but it's only gotten worse since reddit has gone more and more mainstream.
  
  If you follow me on Lemmy since last year, you should know that I've always been extremely against having bots posting here.
- I very much remember this being an issue a couple years ago
Esteemed, world-renowned actress Margot Robbie?!
- That's esteemed Academy Award nominated (and incredibly humble) character actress Margot Robbie to you!
- yep that's really her
I had almost forgotten about him. Wouldn't he also post obvious ads to the hundreds of communities he moderated, and bend the rules so that technically the posts belong?
moderator who would delete posts with traction and repost it himself for karma

I've had this happen to me, it felt so fucking wrong lol. My thread got deleted by the mod and he reposted it as a sticky on his own name without so much mentioning me.

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.

I am sad that the current generation of federated social media/networks still doesn't have much, if any, implementation of web of trust functionality. I believe that's the only solution to bots/AI/etc content in the future. Show me content from people/accounts/profiles I trust, and accounts they trust, etc. When I see spam or scams or other misbehavior, show me the trust chain connecting me to it so I can sever it at the appropriate level instead of having to block individual accounts. (e.g. "sorry mom, you've trusted too many political frauds, I'm going to stop trusting people you trust")
- I think this would be a great feature request: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues
  
  I would definitively use it if it was implemented. Make it work like it is in GPG, where you can rank users based on your trust, and that is then propagated to others.
- I guess the question is how specifically you implement such a system, in this case for software like Lemmy. Should instances have a trust level with each other? Should you set a trust when you subscribe to a community? I'm not sure how you can make a solution that will be simple for users to use (and it needs to be simple for users, we can't only have tech people on Lemmy).
- That sounds smart!
- Yes! Web of trust is the only way. Everything else can be scammed. I am kinda wondering if it could be invites and if severing could be automated for social media. "We just banned a third person who came in on your invitations. Goodbye."
- Definitely something that will emerge in the future once we'll inevitable get bots here too
- That would be awesome, cause you would still be able to see your mom’s post!
Honestly I already believe that this has happened.

My reason for thinking this is because of this:

The spike that happened on October 2023 after the initial spike that happened due to the Reddit protests seems unnatural to me.

Someone gave the explanation of the release of the mobile clients but even then I wouldn't think it would lead to a spike equivalent to the initial one since it would mostly just be people using an account they already had instead of creating a new one.

Like honestly if someone knows what event happened then that made so many new users join I'd appreciate it.
- I didn't get into Lemmy until there was a mobile client available, Sync to be specific. I believe it since a lot of Reddit users were basically mobile only. So, for a few months I basically subsisted on YouTube alone.
- Newer user here... the api stuff got me to delete my reddit account but still surf it, it was the day of the IPO that i created my lemmy account...
- Is that just accounts in total or active accounts?
  
  I didn’t comment much in the beginning.
  
  Now I try to comment at least once a day.

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.

These are probably the bots that will be paid for creating content too. lol
My favorite reposts were the ones that were only like 6 months later, so they're talking about christmas or r/place as if its that time of year when its the total opposite.

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

Feel free to edit the image to change the order, I would update the post with the updated version!
- https://i.imgur.com/OCHkQVg.png

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

They have not, left is the more recent post. The right one could be real and is just recreated by these bots.
- I agree, credit retracted.
No, I think those comments are just unwitting humans walking into the simulation.
- "It doesn't look like anything to me."
Adjective_Noun_#### are default generated by reddit, so they upgraded to their own generator at least it seems.

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

True, that did happen before but the OP image shows something different. It's not just a few comments copied over to the new post it is every single comment copied exactly the same as the original.

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.

That's what it has been like for years now.
- IMO it’s gotten markedly worse since the 3rd party app debacle. Perhaps combined with the advent of AI added to bots has made it obvious. Yeah, it’s been on a decline for quite a bit with the repost bots repeating everything from posts to replies, but people would call them out. Now it’s like it’s bots all the way down or the remaining participants have resigned themselves to the decline.
  
  Small subs still seem mostly safe, but anything with decent participation is pretty bad.
- Reddit went to shit when the zoomers flooded in, arguably the late 90’s kids aswell

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.

Yeah reddit has a name generator that you can choose from when you create an account and that's the format it uses. Those names are almost exclusively bots and throwaway/anon accounts
Well yeah they even have bot in their username.
It's Reddit's automatic username generation, so either yeah, bots, or someone logging in through Google/Facebook and having a username assigned to them.
I'm glad i end with word*_word_word for my screen name, lol.
I don't get it. They already created a good bot network, but the username part is where they get lazy.

Lmao! Dead internet theory!

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.

r/worldnews is just a propaganda sub disguised as a hub for world news.
I was permabanned from r/worldnews for saying we should give free meals to kids at schools here instead of wasting money blowing up other country's kids.

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.

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.

Hang on a sec, how do we know you're not a bot lol

You raise a valid point. Hive mind and weaponising narrative is a danger to us all.
- You would not so best to assume every post is a bot
As an AI language model, it would be highly irresponsible for me to impersonate users on a website. This action violates privacy rights by potentially accessing and misusing personal information. Impersonation involves deception, undermining trust in both the AI and the platform where it operates. Furthermore, it can have legal implications, such as violating terms of service agreements or privacy laws. Ultimately, engaging in impersonation could lead to negative publicity and damage the reputation of the AI and the platform it serves.

/s
- I get the sarcasm, but this is written as if there is one AI and the reality of who knows how many individually run instances all under whatever rules their implementers choose.

Thank god this isn't a problem here

P░ U░S░S░ Y░I░ N░B░I░O ░

hey...

There's no pussy in your bio...

😡
- Just keep clicking. You'll get to the malware eventually.

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.

My favorite are the YouTube comments saying to follow Jesus or whatever regardless of the actual content of the video. Who is that even for? LOL
- Most likely those "Mega" Churches. If you post proof or call it out watch yourself get spam reported. I have gotten reported and temp banned when the bots abuse the automated systems. I know a few devs and they are scared that they can't keep ahead of trying to ID and remove Ai like this.
- Clearly, the algorithm thinks you need Jesus.
- My favorite is the comment I see on 80% of videos: "Upvote if you came here from Tik Tok"
- Have you watched any sporting events recently. Some Christian group is willing to pay millions of dollars for a 30 second "Look at this puppy. Pretty great, right? Jesus. He loves puppies, too" ad spots.
  
  I have to assume that we're just dealing with people who have way more money than sense, and this is literally the best they can come up with in terms of evangelism.
My mechanical keyboard people haven't really migrated over to Lemmy, so I after I stopped posting to Reddit (I still lurk... sue me) I signed onto a couple of legacy forums. A few months ago, one forum had a poster ask about a sketchy email he got from a vendor asking them to mention their keyboard X number of times, and didn't even have to be uniformly positive, as long as he didn't completely shit on them. They needed the visibility. He seemed iffy and I think decided against it, not least of which was that the payment was, IIRC, a free keyboard.

Not two days later, a veteran poster on the other forum magically mentions this obscure and unremarkable vendor, and while they're qualified in their praise, they sure spent a lot of time talking about them. I was about to call it out, but then I just thought, "well hell, at least the company's still using real people as shills. This is life now."

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

oh it's simple, don't capitalize and it's immediately harder to do.
- I do find it funny that you didn't capitalize any words in this comment.

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

...Right?

I don't think there's a single bot on LemSTACK OVERFLOW ERROR PLEASE RESTART APPLICATION TO CONTINUE.
- Have you tried Linux?
  
  spoiler
  
  /s
I want a free, easy, accessible open-sourced social media portal that doesn't ban people arbitrarily and has a steady stream of new content to engage me every time I check it.

monkey's paw curls

Aw, raspberries! It's bots again! You stupid monkey's paw, that's like the third time!
Right guys? Right?
It's nice to not feel that we have to also appease the mods with every comment we make.
Lol you got me at first

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

They may be around, by ironically the lack of content shows they don't post that much
- ....yet.
The internet is full of boobs, Lemmy is no exception. Ripley's Believe It or Not, neither is your mom.

Please don't think this is actually hateful porfis
- More and more lately, I've been thinking about maybe we aren't really meant to be this closely linked together. Like what if everyone just stopped using social media, like it got banned or whatever. Would the world be a better place? Sometimes I wonder if the answer to this would be yes.
- Are you telling me my mom is full of boobs
Is there really a bot problem on Lemmy? It really doesn't feel that way, but I know that facts =/= feelings.
- NO THERE IS NOT 🤖
This belongs on a mug.

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

Ah, I remember the reddit hug of death, from back when ordinary websites existed and got visitors, instead of just the same 25 mega corp sites that get linked now.
- Don't forget that CDNs have helped a lot with 🤗

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

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

Popularity is overrated. Irrelevance is freedom.
- Exactly!
I wonder what the fediverse's answer will be to this problem once it gets popular. Will instances that has a lot of bot content be defederated? some kind of fedipact against bot (unlabled) content?

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

I mean a lot of us still use reddit, you can just ignore the main site and focus on your niche communities
- Which is exactly what an NPC would say.
- I know removing 3rd party apps killed my interaction with reddit. I still occasionally check in on smaller subreddits, but I'm doing it through apps like Stealth and Geddit that bypass the API and are read-only and don't allow commenting/posting.

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.)

To be fair, I sound like a bot sometimes.

To be fair, I sound like a bot sometimes.
- To be fair, I sound like a bot sometimes.
TFW the memes are embedded so deeply in your ADHD brain that you end up sometimes basically just becoming a Markov Chain chat bot.

Divine Light Severed: You are a Flesh Automaton animated by neurotransmitters.

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.

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.

The only possible benefit to this kind of behavior is creating the impression that there's more traffic on Reddit than there really is, from which only Reddit benefits.
- There's plenty of other reasons to do this. From scammers trying to legitimize accounts to use later to groups trying to sway user opinions on the site. This sort of thing has been going on on plenty of other websites for years. This is the same strategy the porn bots on Tumblr used, and they were so prolific there that they got the Tumblr app removed from Apple's app store.
- Especially around IPO time
This doesn't have to be done by Reddit.

I can create as many accounts as I want, scrape old threads, and then replay the old conversations with my new accounts.

Makes it appear very much like the accounts are real people. Then I can sell them to troll farms.
Historically bot posts are from people looking to sell accounts

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

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.

Well they actually don't write that realistically, these are copy and paste bots that are just trying to farm karma so they can later sell the account (which I've heard is a thing apparently?). You can see the left is all original accounts by the uniqueness of their usernames and the copied posts on the right are all reddit generated names.
The left image is the original post, 10 months old, where (at least most) of the users are real people. Left is full of bots copying the post 1:1, comments included.
Or worse still, AI (really LLM) farming.

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

I've been using reddit a bit the past couple weeks, it's getting pretty dry in the fediverse, especially for local content. I got permabanned from our local Reddit communities thread over literally pretty much nothing about a year and a half ago, basically questioning a power mods opinion on something, and then after getting temp banned, asked what the heck like if you aren't agreeing with me just respond with something, and then I got permabanned.

Anyways I wrote them a kind note today asking to be unbanned, as it is a pretty big sub (343k users for a city of 1.5M), and a good source of information. Told them like look, I'm pretty boring and I can behave, like could you prevent me from having to create a new alt account and let's let bygones be bygones?

The response I got was really condescending, they banned me from mod mail, and basically it was just a really weird response. All they had to say was no, thanks, and I would have moved on with my day. I think some of the mods are suffering from some pretty serious mental health issues these days, if not a god complex in the slightest. Reddit is a really really unhealthy place, and thankfully those people reminded me of that. I quickly deleted the app from my phone, and I think I'm done for good this time. The fediverse may be drying up a bit, but at least most of the people on it can behave like adults.
- Idk if it's drying up just because it's slower with responses. I think we're just used to the reddit shitbots constantly responding to us on reddit. The slower pace is better because here, there's actually people responding, not bots.
- I will singlehandedly try to make the fediverse more interesting.
- I don't even bother appealing bans. That's what alt accounts are for
- (343k users for a city of 1.5M),
  
  You can maybe try to create a community here? If a lot of people are on Reddit, you might get some on Lemmy as well

WTF ?

Yes, I was surprised as well

This is extremely dangerous to our democracy.

What if find absolutely wild is how their stock didn't just flop. The site has been on a downward spiral since the first redesign, and with the cut to API they've basically entered a freefall. I could seen people backing Reddit like 14 years ago, but now? Why?

I suppose if there's any optimism to have in OP's post it's that the bots are at least propagating messaging that's better for the greater good than the typical shit that's trying to get us into a full dystopia.
This is extremely dangerous to our democracy.
- This is extremely dangerous to our democracy.
- I understood that reference.

fuck reddit

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.

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

Depends on the instance. Some instances will enshittify, others will fight against this sort of thing. Since Lemmy is federated, if we're stuck on the former we can move to the latter without losing access to the entire network.
- You can’t fight against it. That’s the point. The only tactic is to stay stealth as long as possible.
  
  You won’t win with barrage of AI generated content and massive corporate machine of marketing. No filters or countermeasures are enough against the brute force of money. Not to mention Lemmy is relatively easy to spam and troll compared to Reddit if someone wants to do it.
  
  It’s vulnerable by design because the same vulnerability is a feature of freedom of speech and openness when there are no bad actors.
  
  It’s kind of like anarchism if you think about it. Great concept but collapses from miserable human condition.
  
  I predict we will all(technical hyperliterates) be on some form of TOR sooner or later because that’s the only place where advertisers and ai won’t dare to go.
Definitely, but we're still quite far from that from a userbase size perspective
- Yeah when it reaches that stage we will be brooding on lemmy_alternatives@lemmy to escape the corporate once more

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

Enjoy: https://old.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/170e8dp/reddit_comments_are_full_of_bots_reupload/
- /r/conspiracy of all places, yuck...
- @Blaze
  
  If you want to avoid Reddit tracking altogether a redlib instance will let you do that https://libreddit.projectsegfau.lt/r/conspiracy/comments/170e8dp/reddit_comments_are_full_of_bots_reupload/

Dead internet.

Interesting 🤔 Can you prove that you're a human?
- I can't get the captchas with the motorcycles, ever. I thought i was human but captcha dont lie
- Can any of us?

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

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?

The 10 month ago one (on the right) looks like the original, it was a much more upvoted thread and has much less suspicious usernames
- Your right differs from mine
- Even the original has some generic-users with squirrelly generic posts. But yes, that's what I'd put my money on.

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

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.

This feels like implementing a certificate authority system for individual users I wonder if it is feasible to use of a web of trust that is less cumbersome and more resilient than the original GnuPG WoT, that could do the same thing. Instead of hierarchical introductions you have trusted users vouch for you not being a bot (one could even think about extending this to general rule abidance, turning it into a full on reputation system). It would feel pretty bad to loose an account, just because whoever invited you later also invited a bunch of bots/untrustworthy users