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.
Define “foreign”
In another comment I was accused of being a brainwashed American, so take this for what it is, but some posts — mostly of a political nature — just seem to defy any mainstream thinking across the spectrum. Looking at some user profiles when I come across these, it seems their post history is entire based around fueling arguments, with no agenda, other than breed discontent.
So do you mean foreign as in not born here or foreign as in unusual/out of place
State-sponsored
why do you think they are state-sponsored
Nice try… North Korea. j/k. IDK man, because I watched “The Undeclared War”. Give it a look.
sorry I’m really new to all this
It is a well know fact since at least 2015 that Russia was conducting these operations against US and EU.
It is now widely accepted that all governments do this to some degree.
These operations are the most effective because they have funding from their respecting governments.
other than breed discontent
That is the agenda. Russia would love it if we had no positive or genuine communication with our fellow citizens, and if we were completely divided.
So would the ruling class… in fact ruling class gets a lot more benefit from divisive politics
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Thanks for your … er… um… reply? I guess? For what seems like a response to a different question than the one asked?
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Who cares?
foreign bad actors
Everyone’s speculating so I’ll put in something concrete:
About 3 months ago, r/wholesomememes mods clamped down on karma-farm bots as hard as they could…
causing no new posts to appear for two entire days.
Hey there friends! It’s only been a few days since we started cracking down on the spam bots and excessive reposts that have been plaguing r/WholesomeMemes - and now there is nothing left! –mod
That was reposts as well. Its not like anyone was wasting their life making fresh Facebook grade memes for that that cesspit.
“Foreign bad actors” Sigh. This is propaganda framing.
The fact that reddit is astroturfed by the US government, US actors like Hillary’s campaign in 2016, etc is very well known. Reddit even did an oopsie many years ago admitting that the most active reddit city was a US air force base with influence operations located there, aka psyops, aka propaganda bots.
If it has foreign “bad actors” they don’t control the narrative, they don’t control the main big subs, they don’t have an in with the admin team, they don’t run even a large minority of bots.
If these mythical creatures people like you believe in (as a result of the US policy of always accuse your enemies of what you’re doing to hide it better) to pretend that the problems are all those evil foreigners do exist they exist as grains of sand caught in a mighty torrential river of US propaganda machines and influence operations. They exist hopeless. Helpless. With no friends on the admin team unlike the US propagandists, fighting a pointless fight where they are almost certainly subject to frequent, near immediate bans after mass downvotes by controlled moderators and/or mods who just are that happy to prevent any viewpoint but the US one from existing.
Even framing your question like this is a massive pushing of US propaganda. This isn’t so much a question as a weaponized trojan horse that starts from the point of view of the people who control the most bots and the narrative totally on reddit.
The only thing approaching foreign, non-US “bad actor” astroturfing and botting would have to be the zionist bot effort which is admin and main subs moderation team backed and also backed by the US government by the way who doesn’t care to get upset about it or raise it as an issue and demand it stop because they’re supplying weapons to that genocide.
I mean the way you state it is literally the line being pushed by US government censorship proponents who are angry any foreign voices, any voices but their own are getting through.
Some links from reddit
https://www.reddit.com/r/LateStageCapitalism/comments/z6unyl/comment/iy4mycx/
Well said.
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Your point is fair and I didn’t mean to imply that bad actors are purely foreign. There are plenty of domestic bad actors. Please excuse the “propaganda framing”.
This was my subjective opinion based on the kinds of discussions and posts I see.
A lot of it IS foreign though. I don’t know about a majority, but it’s wild.
Yeah there’s a lot of foreign influence, some of it successful as well:
Romania’s national security council (CSAT) has declassified two documents this week that reveal a coordinated propaganda campaign that boosted an obscure far-right and pro-Kremlin candidate into the country’s first round of presidential elections.
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Just because the US does it doesn’t mean other countries aren’t also doing it. OP said bots or foreign bad actors. Sure, a narrow scope that utilizes propaganda language, but your comment is some false dichotomy whataboutism tankie shit
For sources on foreign influence in U.S. social media, consider:
Well, he could have just said bad actors, but then the answer would be a lot higher…
All of r/WorldNews
It has basically been taken over by the IDF
Fuck them
I’m a foreign good actor (to non-Australians), does that count?
Not to brag or anything, but I was nominated for a couple of acting awards in recent years.
Are you Bluey? That’s exciting!
Many such cases
Yay
Bluey is also from Queensland, so…close enough.
There would be tons of downside if they revealed the bot count. Their website would probably crash and burn. I think it’s well past 50% now. Well past.
Yeah posts getting easily 100K+ upvotes in hours, I’ll say over 70%
Pointless drivel too, stuff like “what’s your favorite color, and why?”.
Im not even sure how normal people post on reddit. Everytime ive ever tried to post on there in a community that isn’t tiny my post is automatically removed and sent to “manual approval” which never actually happens. it baffles me how a website that is so hard to post on remains popular.
Bots on reddit are absolutely a thing. Ever since reddit’s API went private it became exclusively a for-profit venture for manufacturing consent.
If anything the foreign bots have gone down recently but national bots have gotten out of control. Given our political climate I suspect kumbaya posts of being bots more than anyone being polarizing.
Reddit is default “human advice” on what to buy, if you don’t think it’s crawling with companies bots as well
(but feely wise, it’s sub dependent, no one will go to small sub to influence 10 people, conversely big subs are shaped both via allowed topics and first-to-post, first-to-downvote races)
It’s probably higher than that. Every time I comment on there it feels like a play with the way people act and respond. Like it’s not real, or they have a script to follow. No real person would act the way most Redditors operate.
Alternatively, people like to meme on the Internet.
It makes sense that a vote based platform, where users encounter direct positive and negative reinforcement with every interaction, would tend to developing repetitive conversation patterns over time, even if it were populated entirely with humans.
Came here too say that.
This!
Also important to remember that karma farming is a thing over there, alongside the circle jerk. There’s thread after thread of people just saying the same shit over and over because it’s guaranteed karma.
I was on there recently and saw the same LET THEM FIGHT GIF posted 12 times in the same thread and all of them had some number of upvotes
I can’t even understand what human would upvote the trash like that
Sure this can be bots but at least when I was still active this behavior was also just karma whoring by real people. Comment fast before the thread „expires“ and become one of the top rated comments.
I see a lot of this, where it’s become a mix of
- bots
- real people that comment like bots
It comes up on the Reddit moderation side where I look into an account assuming it’s a spam bot but it’s not. There is a certain voice or style that’s similar between the two groups of accounts
There’s a few other categories to consider.
Of small niche subs I’ve moderated, there’s maybe a 10 to 1 or higher ratio of non-active users to active. Look at the highest voted posts of all time or the last year in a sub. If the sub as 10K subscribers, the highest number of votes on any post might be 1K or so. Maybe far less.
I saw on a couple of the sub’s metrics that we would consistently gain 10-20 users a day, and maybe lose 1-3 subscribers daily. But with very little increased engagement. But so we would gain sometimes 500 or even 1000 users in a month, and nothing changes. Why? Always drove me crazy.
A lot of real people start up accounts and quickly abandon them. A lot of bots sub every subreddit and do stupid things like comment when you’re comment is a haiku. Every script kiddie that ever coded a broken bot that never worked right might still have 4 or 5 axcounts out there as a dead subscribers.
And let’s not forget the massive amount of people with multiple accounts (hi!) and the ones with sometimes severe mental health problems, wannabe trolls, and straight up Aholes trying to evade bans. There’s likely more of these out there than actual malicious and active bots.
As for actual malicious bots posting, it’s likely very few, and limited to engagement on larger subs to drop parts of a larger group of talking points. But the places that normally go for that kind of thing also don’t mind hiring a bunch of Nigerian 419 scammers to be real humans posting from the bot accounts sometimes.
Probably a big chunk, thats why i left
