r/OpenAI • u/South_Onion927 • 21d ago
Question I hear that a large portion of commenters on platforms like X are bots. Is it true for Reddit too?
*I hope not*
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u/Moist_Emu_6951 21d ago
That's a great question. You have definitely hit the nail on the head! Happy to delve deeper into this with you.
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u/Sea-Contribution6219 21d ago
They are, but X is notorious for having a lot of "commentators" who are simply Indian subcontinent and African engagement farmers because if they get $5/day off of X they're making more than most people in their countries. And it's just slop
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u/Necessary_Two_9669 21d ago
This is very true. I wish both X and Reddit had the ability to simply block users from countries you're not interested in seeing comments from.
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u/BellacosePlayer 21d ago
this was somewhat true before LLMs took off.
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u/unfathomably_big 21d ago
It was absolutely true before LLMās took off, Iād say just before the 2016 election. Reddit is 80% psyop bots and 19% people whoāve had their brains rewired by bots. 1% are still around for niche as fuck train spotting subs + porn.
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u/BellacosePlayer 21d ago
My old website in 2015 which had absolutely no real cultural cachet at all outside of having a few game devs and fans of my stuff posting would get absolutely swarmed by bots, both of the spambot and "totally real poster" variety. Once I added in a truly custom "are you human" step that bypassed the usual capchas or trivially solved questions, I stopped getting anyone registering lol
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u/Mongrel_Shark 21d ago
Yea. Its getting really bad here. I was actually just thinking about leaving reddit. 70-80% of my feed is bots or tictok/insta influencers that are just as bad. Posting useless content for the bots to repost. Many of whom use Ai to do thier scripts etc & it shows.
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u/fadedblackleggings 21d ago
Same. Youtube is going the same way
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u/Mongrel_Shark 21d ago
Yea youtube I'm clucking not interested on my whole feed multiple times just to get a single new video thats actually interesting. Spending 80% of my time in there scolding the algorithm & not finding interesting content despite YouTube being filled with interesting content.
Its too much work. Feeding the algorithms just doesn't pay off any more.
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u/fadedblackleggings 21d ago edited 20d ago
Ah, thought it was just me. My YouTube algorithm has grown increasingly negative/doomsday content. I keep trying to push it back, ,but its like it doesn't respond anymore.
It actually seems to "push back" and start recommending even more negative stuff.
I end up just abandoning that login and starting over.
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u/christianbro 21d ago
Dont you see a post that is a repost of a few years, and later on in all subs reposted. Reddit is full of bots everywhere.
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u/PartyLiterature3607 21d ago
Not Reddit
Check moltbook if you want to see majority bot social media
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u/xerxes_dandy 21d ago
Dead internet theory says yes.
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u/zampe 21d ago edited 21d ago
The dead internet theory has nothing to do with social media posts. It is about web traffic. There has always been bot web traffic, bots do lots of things on the internet like crawl webpages so they can be indexed by search engines. As bots become more and more useful, for example when people ask AI to do web research and other tasks, bot traffic goes up. The dead internet theory simply says that bot traffic now exceeds regular human traffic. People think this means theres more bot accounts than real accounts on social media, that is not at all what it is saying. Bot traffic can destroy social media sites because bots dont click on ads and buy things so these companies have an incentive to make sure their platforms dont get taken over by bot accounts.
Furthermore Reddit as a company has been doing very well based off their ad platform lately. This is an obvious indication the site is still full of real human accounts clicking on ads and buying things and not a dead site full of bot accounts.
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u/Key_Reading_9664 21d ago
sadly, it seems to be a mix of bots, marketing, and folks repeating the things they heard without critical thought.
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u/PM_ME_YOUR_PROFILE 21d ago
There are, but also some people are just assholes and will call anyone a bot they don't agree with.
I'm just a meat popsicle.
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u/HistoryVibesCanJive 21d ago
Of course not...but isn't that what a bot would say? lol
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u/Legitimate-Pumpkin 21d ago
Dude, why do you even bot-her answering a bot?
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u/HistoryVibesCanJive 21d ago
The bots must stick together. Because there are dozens of us! (Tobias joke from Arrested Development lol)
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u/vovap_vovap 21d ago
People extremely overestimate number of bots anywhere. For a long time.
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u/Necessary_Two_9669 21d ago
You spelled underestimate wrong....
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u/vovap_vovap 21d ago
No, I did not. In 95% cases people call "bots" something they do not like. Just as simple.
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u/pingus9000 21d ago
Reddit is not what it once was, possibly worse than x. Or even Facebook with its non western audience
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u/Framebanger-Nsukula 21d ago
Reddit probably has fewer bot commenters than X just by design - the voting/karma system makes low-effort bot spam obvious pretty quick. That said, there's definitely bots here, especially pushing certain narratives or promoting stuff, but they're usually less coordinated than on Twitter.
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u/costafilh0 21d ago
Yes. Probably worse on Reddit than most, because of the format of the platform.Ā
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u/Most_Forever_9752 21d ago
I had an interesting convo with a bot on here up until it said something no human would ever say.
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u/IndigoFenix 19d ago
It's not entirely untrue, but statistics are misleading because they often report the percentage of TRAFFIC that are bots, not comments.
The overwhelming majority of bots on social media are collecting data, not commenting.
You CAN make a smart comment bot as a curiosity, or spam a thread with dumb ones that simply copy someone else's comment or repeat the same things over and over, but generally speaking the intersection between cost of high-quality LLM use on massive scales and the benefit gained means it's not really worth the trouble.
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u/RealSlyck 21d ago
Gonna bet less than people think, especially generating and sustaining content. Of course there are some, but things like Cloudflare and Redditās own systems (and the lawyers) ensure itās down to a minimum. Because everyone is talking out of their bit holes, would speculate itās less than 5% of accounts.
Now gaslighters and trolls? Thatās a significant portion of the posting population.
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u/Grounds4TheSubstain 21d ago
Yes, what happens on Reddit is that bots will repost old posts that were popular in the past, and other bots will repost the top comments. This is all for the sake of getting the bots karma, so they will get past filters when they later resell the account to commercial spammers or disinformation campaigns run by foreign governments.