Bot accounts. How do they work and how can people tell bot comments from human comments?
In: Engineering
people make “official” bots like that periodic table bot bot, these sare mostly helpful and easy to tell. I wont talk about those. These just use the official api.
reddit has a way for you to send a mesaage to be posted. you dont actually have to use the reddit app to do it, you can just send the eifht netwoek packets from any program.
people also make harmful bots that farm karma to look like real acounts. once the acount looks like a real account it switches to posting advertising or propoganda.
the easieat way I have found to spot them is to look for comments that look copy-pasted from somewhere else. they often dont make sense. generally bots in phase 1 make reposts from sub/top, sometimes with the title changed to the top comment, or 1 nonesense comment in the thread. I find these bots tend to have 6 month old acounts, about 1000 karma, and their oldest post is last week in of the general reddits.
You use to be able to spot them because they would not reply, but now with chatgpt out there it is getting much harder
Latest Answers