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Comment by hazelnut | Hacker News Reader

Is Kevin Rose known to know how to address bot problems? I think it's a little absurd to address a bot problem with bringing back the original founder. I believe he was great at community building and functionality, but bot prevention is a different beast. The post mentioned that they also worked with third parties which I believe should have more bot prevention experience than Kevin.

To be fair, I don't know Kevin Rose personally, so maybe he knows more than the industry, but I highly doubt it.

Reddit has the same problem. They are fighting it more or less successfully. I would look more in that direction.

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Is Reddit fighting the bot problem? They introduced a feature to hide post history which makes it hard to know whether you’re interacting with a spammy bot account. If anything they’re embracing it.

Actions speak louder than words. They’ve added features that help spammers hide their behaviour, they are rejecting API keys when people apply for access to deal with the bot problem, they ignore subreddits with spam-friendly moderators, and they ignore reports on vote manipulation. There’s a tonne of low-hanging fruit for tackling the bot problem on Reddit that they aren’t doing anything about, and often it seems like people outside of Reddit do a better job without access to the raw data than people inside Reddit do with the raw data.

I know they claim to care about the bot problem, but they appear at absolute best incredibly complacent about it, if not complicit. All those OnlyFans spammers, AI spam bots, etc. are engagement. They are ruining the platform for people, but engagement figures don’t distinguish between fake engagement and real people. The outcome of their current behaviour is for engagement to steadily rise while the value to real people steadily falls. It’s like they want to be the poster child for Dead Internet Theory.

I wonder what they say if you apply for API access and say you want to run a spam bot.

I don't think this is helpful to bots tbh. For over a decade every time I come across a clear bot account their comment history seems very human. I assume they're either buying real accounts for one-off astroturfing hit and runs in combination with deleting older astroturfing comments after the submission stops getting traffic to hide their footprints. Or more likely there's a giant ring of bots that submit innocent things and then comment preplanned innocent things in a giant bot circle and then make pointed comments on r/politics or whatever after establishing an innocent baseline. This is the obvious approach I'd take if it were me.

I'd also be really surprised if there wasn't coordination with Reddit employees/execs themselves for big advertisers.

The Reddit CEO mentioned that the community thrives when humans talk to humans - and not with AI slop. He also said they are working on efforts to identify automated accounts.

https://www.businessinsider.com/reddit-ceo-platform-most-hum...

Reddit can't even manage to regularly identify and ban bots that copy previously popular posts/comments verbatim, and that's a much easier problem than modern LLM-based bots.

The used car salesman mentioned that the car was in perfect working condition.

Actions speak more than words, especially true for CEOs.

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