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What percentage of Reddit users are bots or foreign bad actors? (lemmy.sdf.org)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml
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It probably seems weird asking this on Lemmy, but of course posting this on Reddit would get banned or taken down. Reddit doesn’t like being critical of Reddit. Anyways….

Over the last 10 years as a Reddit user I’ve believe the amount of accounts that are bots or foreign bad actors has tipped past 50%. I have no statistics to speak of, but would love if somebody did and could share.

Based purely on some of the conversations, posts, rage bait, strong ideologies, etc… I’m pretty convinced that a reasonable sample of humans could not or would not act the way they do on that platform. So often now I see posts that I feel are specifically attempting to sow discord and disagreement.

Does anyone else agree? What percent of users do you think are bots? Foreign bad actors?

Sadly, I think Reddit has no desire to find out or do anything about it. There would be no upside to them correcting their advertising numbers.

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[–] 23 points 2 years ago (3 children)

I would bet the actual number of active bot accounts is probably lower than many people think. Maybe 20-30%. Those accounts are more active than humans though, maybe accounting for half of all the posts. Many of these bots arnt even proper LLMs, they are just scripts recycling generic comments, catch phrases and old memes and upvoting each other endlessly.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago* (2 children)

    I suppose the spirit of the question was "volume of content" vs "volume of accounts". But there is a problem with loading a lot of content onto a singular account (from a bot detection PoV), and that is that it is easy to detect if an account is a bot if their post history is :

    1. Metronomic (or)
    2. Relentless in volume

    To solve that problem (aka bot camouflage), the maintainers of said bots would use volume of accounts as a disguise mechanism. For that reason I assume that the volume of bot accounts has to scale with the volume of "pushed content" as, in my assessment.. if I were running a bot network I'd want to be sure that my most-active bots were only 50-80% as prolific as known-human accounts.. then simply distribute your content across those "strategically-limited-spam-bots".

    So as a TLDR I guess what I'm saying is that the volume of accounts has to scale with the volume of influence assuming you'd want your influence to appear organic.

    The meta above this would be what, account creation monitoring? It's an interesting conflict. Influence peddlers vs bot detectors.

    What is gross to me is that platforms like Reddit appear to be catering to the influence peddlers. (or in the case of Facebook and Cambridge Analytica.. allying with and giving birth to said influence peddlers to the political gain of Zuckerberg's personal views on politics.)

    Should one person have such power? Probably not. Explains a lot of "unexplainable" occurrences happening.. back to back to back to back to..

    This is the modern incarnation of "billionaires buying newspapers" to maintain control of the narrative.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    The problem is I dont think many of the accounts really care if their total account activity appears organic. They are mostly there to create volume, sometimes to puff up activity metrics, to amplify specific points and narratives, or simply to shut down conversation if it strays into the wrong topic. They know Reddit doesnt actually want to stop them, and the individual accounts rarely say anything interesting enough to justify human users taking the time to evaluate their post history.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago

    You make a good point.. In general, no one cares enough to track all this down. That is true. So that makes me wonder.. who does/would care? So in a capitalist system, until the day the flow of money is impacted, generally nothing changes.

    So if Reddit really is all (or vastly) bots, then aren't advertisers paying to advertise to bots? And if that is true, at a certain point some metrics will show the yield on their investments is bunk.

    Maybe that is how it collapses. I can hope.

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