And I don’t mean like spam bots. I searched this sub and couldn’t find much. For example, I see people tagging u/ savevideo or u/ savephoto, and just saw one “shakespeare bot” that repeated a comment but in “shakespeare language.” Are these real people? Im assuming not, but on the video one I think, I saw the “user” post they got banned. So I’m a bit confused? I’m fairly new here
In: Technology
Reddit has an API (Application Programming Interface) which is basically just a web page meant for software to read and interact with, rather than a human. In Reddit’s case, it’s a series of pages where a program can read comments or other information, then post their own comments, without having to deal with the fluff of the visual aspects.
In the Shakespeare bot’s case, it’s basically asking Reddit every few seconds for “all the posts in a specific set of subreddits,” which reddit gives it. The program, which is running on its creator’s computer, then does some processing to figure out which comments it wants to reply to and what it will say, and then uses the same API to reply directly to the original comment.
However, in order to do this, the bot itself needs its own account, with its own credentials (username & password). The bot sends this information along with the contents of its post so that Reddit knows what username to associate with the bot. This also gives Reddit the power to ban a bot as if it were a human, because to Reddit’s servers, they’re basically the same thing.
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