this post was submitted on 11 Mar 2024
397 points (98.3% liked)
Asklemmy
43418 readers
2746 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I had my Reddit very heavily curated, my subs were mostly smaller subreddits. I was incredibly active and had my settings so that anything I voted on would not appear on my homepage. I got to see a ton of posts because of that.
Around 2021, I started noticing that reposts weren't just people coming in and posting things we've seen a dozen times because they had no way to know it was a repost. It was bot networks that would take top posts and then other bot accounts would recreate the original post's comment section. The accounts followed patterns and became really obvious to spot after a while.
The original tells were the bots taking really specific posts that only made sense in that context. Popular post from last Christmas? The bot doesn't know what Christmas is, sees a popular post from a few months ago and reposts someone happy about their gifts in August. Look at this beautiful picture I took of the summer Alaskan wilderness this morning but it's February. The photography subreddits were obvious because the bots would rotate the picture a few degrees which would sometimes ruin the picture's aesthetic.
I'm not sure if it was just me spotting them easier or if they were really ramping up into 2022 but by the time they killed API access and I stopped using it, I think over 80% of posts were bots. Made leaving the site way easier.
Yeah, repost bots were out of control and places like freekarma4u helped them propagate for years with no interference from reddit. Would've been simple to shut that down if they were really worried about stopping bots but instead they ignored numerous reports, allowing the bots to run rampant.