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What do y’all think of Transformers: Botbots?
Main Post: What do y’all think of Transformers: Botbots?
Top Comment: I don’t know why but i just opened reddit and thought this was a picture of the teen titans from teen titans go
Please explain exactly what is a Bot on Reddit?
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Coming from an older guy who has moved slowly with technology. I hear Bot all the time on here and thanks to another poster I now know when someone has a tremendous amount of Post Karma but few Comment Karma they are likely a bot. But is a bot an actual human with nothing to do with their time but to post on here or can it be something computer generated? Which is what I've assumed when I first started hearing the term used here.
Top Comment: A bot (short for robot) is a program that is programmed to automatically read the comments on reddit and respond accordingly, or automatically make posts on reddit. Some bots are programmed to respond to specific prompt, for example if I post a link to Wikipedia, there's a bot that will automatically respond with an excerpt from that page. There's a bot on r/worldnews that automatically post a summary of each article posted to that sub. And of course there's r/AutoModerator , a bot that can be programmed by each subreddit's moderators to do all kinds of things. Anyway, there are also malicious bots, whose job is to abuse reddit. For example, they find old popular posts and just post them again (repost bot) in order to gain karma. There are even bots that take copy old popular comments from the old post, and comment them on the new post. These bots are intended to gain karma (popularity) so they can later be sold, and for example be used to post advertisements or whatever.
How to Identify Bots on Reddit
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Behold, the most useless talent of all... being able to discern a human redditor from a bot.
Due to the choices Reddit is making in their effort to grow their userbase to make themselves look good to investors, this can be a handy guide for identifying whether a user making le funni viral post is a bot, without needing to be terminally online. Once you read this guide, and a few other references I'll link at the end, you will start seeing bots everywhere. You're welcome.
What is a bot?
A bot is a reddit account without a human behind it. It makes posts and comments instantly, without regard to context or timing, it just has determined that the thing it is posting or commenting has gotten a lot of upvotes in the past, so there is a good chance it will happen again. "Ethical" bots will have a footer at the bottom of their posts or comments, stating that they are a bot, as you have probably seen from many Automoderator comments. The ones I'm talking about are the ones that try to blend in with everyone else. They try to trick you into thinking they're real people. They are the most insidious of all, because when they are done with their first task, gaining karma, they move on to more nefarious tasks after being sold to whoever is willing to buy. These activities range from spreading misinformation/disinformation, propaganda, promoting a product, or outright scamming people with bootleg dropship merch. There is a large market for buying high karma accounts, and businesses, governments, and other entities will pay big bucks to have that kind of influence.
But karma is useless internet points. Why would anyone pay money for that?
Karma lends legitimacy to an account on Reddit. It makes a user seem more "trustworthy" which is obviously the goal, especially if you're trying to sell or make fake reviews for a product or service. Many subreddits have their automods programmed to automatically remove posts and comments from users with low post/comment karma. When an account gains sufficient post and comment karma, they now have a much, much bigger audience to influence.
What does account age have to do with anything?
Some subreddits automods will remove posts/comments if an account is new, so bot creators get around that easily by creating a bot account and letting it sit dormant for 2 weeks to a year or more, therefore satisfying the requirement for pretty much every subreddit.
Now that I've covered the basics, let's get down to some of the types of bots you will see when browsing Reddit.
Repost Bots (with comment history)
Comment history is usually very short.
Comments only in AskReddit (a hotbed for bots trying to build comment karma)
Basic comments that easily fit in anywhere (e.g. 10/10, Agree, so cute, I love it, etc)
Sometimes has comments that are out of context to the post that its on.
Spam comments (literally just the same comment made multiple times, often used by spam, OF, and link bots)
Comments that were copypasted from the last time the content was posted. These ones are harder to identify, besides the disproportionate amount of upvotes that they get compared to the total amount of comments they have.
The laziest ones of all have just one comment that is just keyboard mash gibberish (i.e. klsjdfshdf) made on another bots post which is also in gibberish, and has 3 upvotes or more. They do this with the help of upvote bots to artificially boost their comment karma quickly.
They cannot process basic symbols. If they make a repost and the original title contains a symbol like "&", the bot will only be able to output "&" in the title, which is an even more damning red flag that the reposter is actually a bot.
Repost Bots (no comment history)
These bots do not have a comment history, which is a big red flag.
Sometimes they will have comment karma but no visible comments. Another red flag.
They cannot process basic symbols. If they make a repost and the original title contains a symbol like "&", the bot will only be able to output "&" in the title, which is an even more damning red flag that the reposter is actually a bot.
Thot Bots
Sometimes makes a few reposts to cartoon subs (i.e. Spongebob, etc) asking a question for community engagement. Further inspection of their profile reveals who, or what, they really are.
The rest of their post history is straight up porn, advertising their porn membership site in the title or comments.
Sometimes they have an OnlyFans link in their profile description.
Sometimes spam self profile posts with their porn link over and over.
They will sometimes crawl NSFW subs and spam their scam porn service.
Comment Bots (Text)
All comments are copypasted from another source. Could be from further down in the thread, or from a previous iteration of the post. The former is easy to spot because they only copy highly upvoted comments and paste it as a reply to the top comment. The latter is harder as you have to search for the last time the content was posted and look over the comments to find the source.
Sometimes the bot makers are lazy and make their bots only copy fragments of comments. These are pretty easy to spot. If you see a comment that looks like it is unfinished or an out of context, incomplete sentence, search for those words within the thread to see if you can't find the actual source it was lifted from.
Ok, let's face it, bot makers are for the most part incredibly lazy. Sometimes they leave an extra \> in their code, which makes their bots comments in quote format in Reddit markdown. These are also easy to spot. When the entire comment is quoted, that is a big red flag to investigate that account further.
The comment might be copypasted with a letter taken out of it somewhere, or with the letters switched around, to prevent detection by automod and spambot detectors.
The comment might be copypasted and "rephrased" which makes it more difficult to identify. Possibly assisted by AI.
Comment Bots (ChatGPT)
They basically just feed ChatGPT a prompt (the parent comment) and then their reply is what ChatGPT spits out.
Very "wholesome" style of commenting (they will never swear or be lewd or edgy), perfect punctuation/grammar
Emojis used at the end of some comments
Comments are medium length
Sometimes hard to spot. You just gotta find a really fucking corny PG comment and investigate further.
Scam Bots
They share traits with basic text comment bots, generic responses (agree, 10/10, etc)
They crawl image posts of merch like Tshirts, prints, mugs, etc and will reply to one or more comments with a scam link leading to a Gearlaunch site (infamous for poor quality merch and rampant credit card fraud)
Their links usually have .live, .life, or .shop in place of .com
The website they link to always has "Powered by Gearlaunch" at the bottom
Are often accompanied by dozens of downvote bots that will downvote any comment containing the keywords "spam" "scam" "bot" "stolen"
They will sometimes block you if you call them out or flag them as a scam bot.
Comment Bots (bait bots)
They are in cooperation with scam bots.
They share traits with basic text comment bots, with very generic responses (agree, 10/10, etc)
They crawl image posts of merch like Tshirts, prints, mugs, etc and ask where to buy
They are replied to with a link by a scam bot, usually a link leading to a Gearlaunch site.
Comment Bots (GIFs - an ad campaign by Plastuer)
Post nothing but GIFs as comment replies to anyone posting a GIF hosted by GIPHY
All of the GIFs they post have a watermark of Plastuer (dot) com, which sells a shitty live wallpaper program and is behind the creation and proliferation of these bots.
Very prolific in shitpost subs and any sub that allows GIF comments
Because of the above they are very hard to get rid of. They gain a massive amount of karma very quickly. Flagging them will usually get you downvoted.
They will block you after a few days of flagging them as a bot, so you can no longer reply to their comments or report them.
Common Bot Usernames and Avatars
Reddit generated (Word_Word####)
WordWord
FirstNameLastName
Gibberish/keyboard mash
No profile pic, or a randomized snoo as an avatar
It is very important to consider many factors if you are trying to determine if a user is a bot. If you try to flag a bot based off of just one or two matching traits, you have a high chance of getting a false positive, and have an irritated human clap back at you. The safest bet is if you have three to four or more red flags (i.e. Common bot username, gap in account creation/first activity, dubious comment history, suspicious out of context comments) there's a pretty good chance you've found a bot.
And it's only going to get worse from here, as Reddit is encouraging bot activity. If you have read this guide to completion, here is some more recommended reading:
u/SpamBotSwatter has some good writeups on how to identify other kinds of bots too, and more comprehensive research on usernames, as well as long lists of known active bots.
There is also a free third party app still alive called Infinity (r/Infinity_For_Reddit) that is helpful in catching bots, since that app timestamps comments with the exact time, rather than the official apps time elapsed format. You can see if multiple comments are being made in different subreddits within the same minute, which is another big indicator of bot activity.
I hope I have helped someone see the light on the massive tidal wave of bots we are facing on this website. Godspeed.
Top Comment: Wow, thanks man. Guess I'm going to be looking for bots now. Never knew they were that prevalent and diverse.
ELI5: Bot accounts. How do they work and how can people tell bot comments from human comments?
Main Post: ELI5: Bot accounts. How do they work and how can people tell bot comments from human comments?
Top Comment: Somewhat recently, there has been a large influx of automated accounts that use ChatGPT to make comments. There are even quite a few in this subreddit. They scan post titles and use it as the prompt, then reply "accordingly." You can easily tell bots apart from humans based on what they focus on in their comment, their grammar, word usage, and punctuation. ChatGPT accounts frequently respond like the post is a direct conversation with them, use more energetic wording, and overall feel more sanitized. Check out an obvious bot account, sometimes they'll comment on media posts with vague titles and respond pretty terribly. For example, a common bot comment in r/Starterpacks is "Ah, the [title]!" Here is ChatGPT's response to your post title: Sure! Bot accounts are automated programs designed to perform tasks on the internet, like posting comments or sending messages, without human intervention. They work by following pre-defined instructions or algorithms. To tell if a comment is from a bot or a human, here are some clues: Repetitiveness: Bots often post similar or identical comments repeatedly because they follow a set script. 2. Timing: Bots can post at odd times or with unnatural frequency, unlike humans who usually comment throughout the day. 3. Content: Bot comments may lack depth or relevance to the discussion, often being generic or off-topic. 4. Language: Bots might use strange syntax or grammar errors, though some are programmed to mimic human speech more accurately. 5. Profile Information: Check the account's profile—if it's incomplete, lacks personal details, or uses a generic username, it could be a bot. Platforms use algorithms to detect and remove bot-generated content, but it's still possible to encounter them. Being aware of these signs can help you identify bot comments online! Note that the AI mostly failed to respond properly, and missed the context of your post. Only a couple of the tips are relevant for modern bot accounts. You can also see that the structure is very list-esque. This is extremely common in question subreddits.
Those TLDR Reddit Bots, how can I get one or make one?
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Those bots that condense long text/articles down by 70% or something would be really helpful for work, where I often have to read big long reports that say in 100 pages what you could say in 10. Any way to get hold of the code to do that, or approach writing ones yourself?
Top Comment: https://paperswithcode.com/task/text-summarization https://huggingface.co/docs/transformers/v4.21.3/en/main_classes/pipelines#transformers.SummarizationPipeline
Made my first Reddit bot.
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So I finally decided to bite the bullet yesterday, and made my first Reddit bot. It's a bot that I see here popping up countless times and decided to make my own version of it. Introducing u/ProjectSuggestionBot.
As the name suggests, it's a bot which checks the subreddit for posts asking about project suggestions and replies with a list of project ideas. I'm ashamed to admit but this took me more time to make then it should have. I had browse the documentation, look up code snippets for a few parts, learn regex , figure out Markdown format and so on.
I decided to tackle the project in small chunks to figure out how each part functions such as: reading data, getting posts streams, testing comments, figuring out keywords and much more. At the end, I Frankensteined all the code I figured out should work and tested it on a private subreddit. Voila!! It worked.
I am open to suggestions and criticism about the project. You can find a link to the GitHub repo here. I have laid out a roadmap ahead, which I intent to build on in the coming days. I don't know if this is a good project to put on my resume, but I figured I might as well start somewhere.
Also, I wanted suggestions as to how I can host the bot online 24*7. Would it be possible to host it via Github Actions or should I host it on the AWS Free Tier. Any suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks
Top Comment: I get a 404 error when I try and click on your GitHub link. Is the link correct? Try opening it yourself in incognito, it may be accessible only if you're logged into your GitHub account.