It's been well know to happen on reddit too for many years. Whole posts and comment threads copied verbatim with new accounts. Nowadays with AI you can make it way more dynamic.
I've acquired a sense for at least some of the bots. There's this set of bots that post a high-engagement post about once a day to an implausibly large range of subreddits, with implausible regularity. I can tell by the way I remove them and the way that the other subs are mostly not that most subs have not figured this out yet.
There is an obvious solution to that problem, which I haven't wanted to put out there, but I've become increasingly suspicious that it's already been figured out anyhow, which is to limit a specific user account to a specific "persona" with plausible interests and posting rates.
And that's where I think the race may well end, victory spammers. If there's a winning move against that in general I haven't figured it out.
I know reddit is concerned about this at the corporate level but I'm not sure they realize this is possibly their #1 threat, towering above all others. Not that I have any specific suggestions about what to do about it either. And it's years before the masses realize this and stop visiting, and by the time that happens all the social media companies are going to be in trouble for the same reason. You can see the leading edge here on HN but it's still only an almost negligible fraction of the total userbase of something like Reddit today. But that will change.
But definitely, bots on reddit seem significantly more common in the past year or two.
I think there are non bot reasons to do that.
Well... to be more precise... I'm abundantly positive there are bots and shills here in a general sense. But when it comes to identifying specific accounts as bots or shills, it gets difficult. Yeah, a lot of us have gotten pretty good at identifying the "default LLM voice", but it is trivial to kick it out of that.
I have done some formal writing with AI, and I always feed it a sample of my own writing to emulate. It doesn't do it perfectly. For instance, I'm a semi-colon kind of guy and it still em-dashes without more explicitly instructions to avoid them. But what comes out the other end would definitely pass most people's "default LLM voice" sniff test; it eliminates most of the tells [1] people look for. (I just checked. The resulting output may actually be "better" at avoiding the tells than my own actual text...)
The upshot of all of that is that we are approaching a point with the current AIs that with just a bit of clever prompting it may take many, many kilobytes of text for someone to form a justified (!) opinion that some set of posts is actually AI.
Fortunately and in fairness to this site, they’ve become rarer, and most seem to be flagged within hours. Usually I look at the comments to confirm, and most are already dead.
It is safe to assume that you missed the ones that are not identifiable.
"For many years" being around 20 years at this point. Not sure reddit is a great example, given the founders admitted to using sockpuppets almost since day 1 in order to generate fake activity on the platform.