Reddit used to get flooded with bots before elections. By 2024, they were just around all the time. I got permabanned after that, but it's probably even worse by now.

No there is just a major world event, a war in Iran, and people want to dump their angry hot takes about it incessantly. So you are going to have a big influx of people grandstanding about it being good or evil.

The majority of posters are indistinguishable from bots, because well, just like bots, they are working off a contrived script about who is good and who is evil.

I've seen some pretty broad and good takes about the current conflict, but they are far and few and most of the replies are harassing them for not picking a side.

Everyone on the Internet is a bot except you.

I’ve not yet noticed any deviations from the norm

I saw some obvious bots like a week ago, there are some among us for sure.

Maybe there's more than usual, because of the Iran related stuff.

Maybe there's just a higer percentage of neurospicy people on the fediverse.

I saw a couple that were obviously bots, when I looked at a news-relevant hashtag on mastodon today. I only noticed two, but that's two more than usual.

There is a bot that posts nothing but links to reddit threads. I could block it or bots in general but then I won't be able to downvote the posts it makes. It moderates the communities it posts to so reporting it would do fuck all.

Not this bot again.

Just my guess - meant to bait people into making various threats to see how well Palantir's social media monitoring works at the fringes.

Be careful out there, y'all.

Either way that doesn’t sound fun :( stay safe!

not as bad reddit

Some people block political threads, so all that's left are those that don't block them... which tends to be people who strongly believe in their opinions or want to use it as a soapbox to rant... so there's rarely any just "chill" opinions or nuanced takes. Almost everyone on a political thread is gonna be angry at something... against one side, cheering for the destruction of one side... or both sides...