Where do they pull information from/how do they know what to say? And who makes/benefits from these accounts?
In: Technology
Different bots operate differently and pull information from different sources.
A bot is a program. It looks at certain things and takes actions based on criteria met. That application or program that we call a bot, in this case named auto moderator, runs on a server somewhere.
ELI5 uses a bot to make sure all the posts start with ELI5. So it looks at every post made on ELI5. If has ELI5 at the beginning it ignore the post.
If it doesn’t have ELI5 at the beginning, it takes the actions it was programmed to (in this case, removing the thread and asking the user to resubmit with ELI5 at the beginning).
Other bots are more complicated, like a chat bot potentially. I don’t know that I’ve interacted with any of them — there are plenty of humans dumb enough to pass for robots, I don’t need to assume dumb things were written by robots.
But most bots just see X or Y and do A or B.
Who makes them? People who want to experiment with a practical use for their programming knowledge. People who want to help Reddit mods. People who are bored and just want to tinker.
I know I didn’t hit all of your points, but I hope I helped. What did I miss?
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