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Comment by CommieBobDole | Hacker News Reader

Yesterday, in a slightly obscure subreddit I frequent, every single one of the posts were by bots reposting old content from the subreddit with random letters changed in the title. Upon further examination, most of the comments were from other bots as well.

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All they did was automate a process living, breathing human redditors have followed for over a decade: farming karma with reposts. The fact nobody noticed the switch over from human repost spam to bot repost spam is pretty indicative about the overall quality of the site's community, I think.

I think reposts should be automatic anyway. Lead if you cannot win. Users who crave for new posts and discussions don’t go necro because the discussion is closed, and also they couldn’t say anything there without repeating someone else. Most people discuss posts not to engrave knowledge into the internet, but simply to interact with someone and satisfy their need to be heard. Those who don’t want reposts could then set some today’s-rating threshold.

The slightest historical and often not very well-thought nuances of platforms that we use can influence the whole internet landscape.

Yet another case of humans failing the Turing test

UI/UX shapes how people react to what they see. Since the reddit redesign the quality of discussion has dropped significantly. When the interface shows less than half the content it used to and it's all focused around reddit gold emojis etc instead of the actual comment chains and posts it's expected. Sure you can redirect to old reddit but most won't and you can't change the quality of content other people put out. Overall it's incredible how easy it was for me to go from several hours of browsing interesting topics daily to barely using the site.

Funny, i've been a redditor for 15 years. And for some reason I have a good memory on posts...

I have noticed that bots are karma farming by taking the old top front-page links and reposting them.

Im not a fan, but this also isnt a bad thing (per se) ; a good post from two years ago, that people haven't seen before is still a good post.

The problem is that reddit's admins and, in general, the mods of various subreddits are absolute douchebags. The policies for the site are dark-pattern-based-yet-lying-about-truth and the fucking support system is an absolute joke.

I find it ironic that HN, who initially funded reddit has such a myopic view on threaded commentary, and is also heavy handed on their modding, is so blind to aspects of reddit's cess pool of dark-patterns... while at the same time ignoring the awesome things about reddit.

There are so many things about reddit that are great, juxtaposed to all the things about reddit that suck, (cannibals (spez), spaceDicks, jetpack election selling, ultra-karma-whores (violenta cruze and the other guy), etc... but both reddit and HN seem allergic to even touching this third rail of criticism...

If you want to be the front page of the internet, we need to be able to discuss and address opportunities for improvement. We NEED to have the ability to oust mods who are actually alts for admin accounts that abuse their power.

I see many things. You are transparent. I am not here.

Yes! Exact same thing in a small subreddit I frequent. You can click into the user's post history and it'll be a bunch of posts to random subreddits with the exact same thing - picture grabbed from I assume an old post that got a lot of upvotes, title copy-pasted with a letter swapped in one of the words. Must be some new wave of bots that reddit's spam detection isn't handling.

The fact that Reddit hasn't enacting controls to limit bot activity should be illegal.

These central social media sites are being actively used for political influence operations.

If I remember correctly, the first days of Reddit were filled with bots posting to fake some user activity so that humans would ditch other platforms.

I don't remember if it was bots or just employees taking on several different "personas." But the goal of presenting a more active community was the same regardless.

Exactly and it's SO obvious. I honestly don't understand how anyone can still read Reddit... these political groups basically run the site now.

Yeah I'm sure Russian bots are basically running r/trains

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