this post was submitted on 07 May 2025
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Is it? Reddit has been full of bots for years.
And if the r/CMV thing didn't make it apparently, the recent wave of them weren't "caught in the act" and only became a "problem" when the researchers announced their shitty experiment.
If realistic chat bots can fool the masses, why on earth would reddit get rid of them? It helps their metrics. "Look at how active our site is! Buy stock!"
Meta is paying to make its bots, Reddit gets it for free!
A metabot walked into a subreddit...
half of thier site are bots, RUSSIA probably makes a majority of those bots, something reddit isnt doing anything about
You're not wrong but what does Russia have to do with anything here?
Shitty experiment? On the contrary, it was an amazing experiment.
I know you enjoy hating on Reddit but what you're saying doesn't make any sense. Reddit is an advertising business. Bots don't view advertising but adds infrastructure cost. Additionally, humans are way better at engagement with the platform and people than bots.
Bot activity brings "engagement" which generated more page views from actual humans. Literally the only downside of this announcement is the optics of having bots in the first place.
The bots were already indistinguishable from humans on reddit, do you really think that this recent scrutiny is going to lead to fewer bots? Or might it actually lead to better bots?
Additionally additionally, as it says in the article, reddit sells its content to OpenAI, and in order to do that, they need it to be organic. If you feed AI output back info AI, it makes the output worse, not better. So, there's another financial incentive to ensure that the people talking on reddit are actually human.
If openai kept buying reddit data after 2022, they are idiots. They let the cat out of the bag.
they are selling it to both OPENAI and google for thier AI too.
I would like to remind you of two things. The first is that reddit used to have a mod tool called "BotDefense". Its shutdown in July of 2023 directly lead to a major uptick in Spam Bots.
The second is that part of the ad revenue is "impressions". Impressions are just an account (bot or human) "viewing" the ad and they do not require a click-through. The platform hosting the ad still gets paid for those.
Yeh but feeding reddit user output into AI is part of the reason why AI is so confidently incorrect so often.