Like people always say reddit is filled with bots, but I looked through the users of the top posts and didn’t find evidence that they are bots.
Like how do you know who is a bot? Is there things to look out for?
Edit: And I’d appreciate it if there are real examples of bots getting caught and the evidence of them being bots.
I never tossed my Reddit account when I left, so I still get notified of replies to my posts and comments; I’d say there’s a third type of bot - an “engagement bot” that takes high karma comments on old posts and replies to them in a manner that adds nothing but could trigger the original commenter to reply.
At first I thought it was actual people, but it’s always young accounts with high post volumes, all the same type of post that nobody who had actually read the original thread would have written. And the accounts seem to target high karma comments, and aren’t limited to any particular subreddit.
I mentioned I had several replied to years-old comments I made when I landed in a tech support thread after not using reddit for a year. Someone replied (to the Lemmy comment) saying Reddit changed the way comment threads are viewed. Logging out, I could see they were right…
Reddit will now only show about half the thread without clicking the expand button. Instead, it fills that space with “related posts” using the world’s worst algorithm. Post age doesn’t matter - in my case, a post about the patch notes for a game I don’t play anymore had recommended a post about the state of the game 6 years ago in which I commented
[EDIT] My anecdote is NOT saying Reddit bots aren’t real.
I have to admit; I suspect that some of the Reddit bots are calling from inside the company.
There’s karma farm bots to sell to companies for astroturfing but yes, Reddit absolutely runs their own bots to fluff engagement metrics