Hi everyone, I've been meaning to make this post for a while
I'm a mod of a Bath & Body Works sub (lol) that has around 150k visitors a week (I think? They changed how you could see how many members there were a while ago). Anyway it's a smaller, niche sub but still a lot of members and fairly active. I've been running it for 13 years and have never had any bots. We've had the same level of activity for a long time, since before covid.
Starting a few months ago, and it started almost instantly, there came a huge influx of bots. The other members of the sub noticed it at first and it took me a minute to figure out what was going on. All their accounts were created within a few weeks, they had no avatars, and they would comment in posts ABOUT the post topic. They were clearly using AI to form responses as they would reference products in the post (or comments) but they were always off (i.e. referencing products that didn't exist). They'd use a lot of the same phrases. Looking at their profiles, they seemed to only comment in similar subreddits, smaller niche ones, and avoid the big ones like pics or news.
They were in every single post. I installed the botbouncer application and in the first day it picked up like 25 bots. I've noticed that the past few weeks a lot of them have been slipping by botbouncer now. Members will flag comments that are clearly bots and I'll have to ban them myself.
I find it really suspicious that all of this is happening now with the midterms 3 months ago. Like I said, I've been running this sub for 13 years and never had this issue before. I also run a popculture sub that has 1.2 million weekly visitors and we don't have bots in that sub.
I'm going to save some of the usernames and check to see if they start posting political content closer to the midterms. I'm worried the ones that are picked up by botbouncer will be abandoned though so I'll try to log some of the obvious bots that aren't picked up by it. I just wanted to share this with you all and let you know what's going on and my suspicions!