Probably the simplest answer is they can get away with it. They have been getting away with it. Botting reddit appears to be extremely easy.
During the pandemic lock downs out of boredom I would scroll r/all to bookmark obvious bot accounts. I had like >95% success rate. There’s only few markers to pick out.
Few months old account with no activity since registration
Some time after the 3 month mark the account becomes active copying old comments from old popular posts
It spams a few popular reposts until one of them gets at least 4 digit karma. Low hanging fruit like animal pictures or emotional baiting.
Once these conditions are met the account goes dormant. Some time later it will become active again. The majority of the time the accounts were spamming cryptocurrency scams.
The final step which often happens is the account gets deleted. Not removed or shadowbanned by reddit but self deleted.
I bookmarked hundreds of accounts of the course of a year or so. Only a small fraction were false positives. I’m sure a coder could easily have written a spam bot detection system based on this.
You know I had suspected this because I mean why wouldn’t they but damn they’re just kinda incompetent with it.
Like why wouldn’t they backdate the accounts?
Probably the simplest answer is they can get away with it. They have been getting away with it. Botting reddit appears to be extremely easy.
During the pandemic lock downs out of boredom I would scroll r/all to bookmark obvious bot accounts. I had like >95% success rate. There’s only few markers to pick out.
Once these conditions are met the account goes dormant. Some time later it will become active again. The majority of the time the accounts were spamming cryptocurrency scams.
The final step which often happens is the account gets deleted. Not removed or shadowbanned by reddit but self deleted.
I bookmarked hundreds of accounts of the course of a year or so. Only a small fraction were false positives. I’m sure a coder could easily have written a spam bot detection system based on this.