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
A bot is just a program running on a computer somewhere–it could be a server in the cloud, a desktop/laptop, or I suppose you could even do it on a smartphone if you were so inclined.
Reddit has the “normal” interface where you go to reddit.com and you see the posts and comments laid out on the page, but it also has a computer-readable format that just packs the data in nice easily digested chunks. 3rd party Reddit apps tend to consume that interface and apply their own formatting.
A bot will also use that interface and check for whatever trigger the programmer sets it to. Sometimes that means checking every comment looking for certain phrases (e.g. the ubiquitous grammar correcting bots that are quickly banned because they’re stupid and add nothing to the conversation). Many will periodically check for username mentions, then jump to whatever comment mentioned their name.
Once the program has detected its trigger it does whatever it was programmed to do. Simple bots may just reply with a canned message. Marginally more complex would be doing a find-replace, a unit conversion, or looking up a keyword in a database (this is common on competitive card game subreddits like /r/mtg where bots are made to facilitate calling out a card by name, then the bot will look up a link to that card and post some relevant information from it). The sky is the limit here–a bot could take in an image of a chess board and tell you the best next move, or take in an entire news article and run it through a pile of AI to spit out a summarized version of the article.
When that processing is done the program then usually posts a comment. Technically the bot can interact with reddit in any way a human can, but certain interactions are bannable (e.g. posting the same link all over the place, upvoting/downvoting).
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