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.
I’ve seen two bot patterns (called out by the users themselves in context) in years of using reddit; both rely on the bot accounts having karma-farmed the system (and these include adding to their karma farm):
(a) Repost-bots: they take a good image content post from some time ago which may not have been popular at the time, or posted in a more niche subreddit, and repost it as their own content in a popular subreddit a period of time later, using very specific timing to hit their target audience. Commenters call this out but a lot of folks just click on images and upvote and don’t read comments (memes, etc.), so the accounts tend to have longer lifespans.
(b) Comment-bots: they are similar to the above, but instead farm good content comments which have low or few upvotes (typically because the comment was posted “too late” in a thread, timing is everything when posting on a massively read thread - first in gets the upvotes so to speak). These get called out as well by other commenters more successfully and people start to block those accounts, so I see the comment farm bot accounts rotate frequently and have short lifespans. You see this in a lot of News articles.
Sorry no examples on hand, but spend enough time and you see the patterns (or, shall I say used to) - I’ve left Reddit to only one niche hobby now so my experience is out of date by a year or so (i.e. not aware of the “AI bot” revolution patterns). $0.02 hth
Edit: I should note that not all bot accounts are bad, my niche hobby has a subreddit specific bot (think like an IRC channel bot) which farms the upstream vendor content (website, twitter, youtube, etc.) and posts in the subreddit for everyone’s benefit. This type of bot is clearly labeled as a bot and approved by the admins of the subreddit, just like iRC.
Before the API event, I was already considering leaving reddit. I had been there for ~12 years at that point, and I swear every 5th post was an identical repost in a different sub of something that was popular 6mo - 2yr ago. Then the top comments in the reposted threads were always the same. For the last year or so before I left, the main feeling reddit brought me was annoyance. Then they decided to force people onto the main reddit app… personally I don’t feel the need to view ads while already dealing with the repost bullshit, such a bad experience.
The repost bots often use oddly-phrased headlines – often commenters will even talk about how weird the headline is. I can’t tell if the posters are actually bots, or if they are content farmers from certain countries. (The odd phrasing may sound natural in their language.)
Another tactic is to post an obviously incorrect headline to draw engagement, like mis-identifying a picture of the Empire State Building as Chicago.
Both of these happen frequently with image posts.
I never tossed my Reddit account when I left, so I still get notified of replies to my posts and comments; I’d say there’s a third type of bot - an “engagement bot” that takes high karma comments on old posts and replies to them in a manner that adds nothing but could trigger the original commenter to reply.
At first I thought it was actual people, but it’s always young accounts with high post volumes, all the same type of post that nobody who had actually read the original thread would have written. And the accounts seem to target high karma comments, and aren’t limited to any particular subreddit.