• BeamBrain [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    Normally I’m skeptical of “Reddit is full of bots” claims because Occam’s Razor tells me it’s probably just a bunch of wealthy white techbros having wealthy white techbro opinions

    But exact comment chains being posted verbatim months later is incredibly damning

    • UlyssesT [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      I’d have believed it was just wealthy white techbros having wealthy white techbro opinions if if the unqualified smugness was at least mixed up a little. It wouldn’t be that hard for a program to imitate combinations of “um” “honestly, let’s be honest” “____ much?” and ableistic concern trolling insults.

    • LiberalScratcher [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      A couple of years ago the Navy bought an ad campaign which included them streaming on twitch everyday. They always had a few thousand viewers which I thought was bullshit especially because there were only 10 or so people chatting. After watching the chat for about 30 minutes the same 10 chatters had the exact same things to say again. 30 minutes later it happened again.

      I was going to document it, but by the time I decided to people like y’all came in and started spamming things like “What’s your favorite war crime???” and it became way to chaotic to prove it.

  • UlyssesT [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    Job Creators Network is a nonpartisan organization founded by entrepreneurs who believe that many government policies are getting in the way of the economic freedom that helped make this country prosperous.

    Most cursed sentence of the day. yea

  • flan [they/them]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    this is basically every post in the default subs. In some cases bots will also recycle comments from imgur and other places

  • infuziSporg [e/em/eir]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    At first glance this looks terrifying, as if they’ve created bots to emulate discourse and inflate content/engagement/numbers for whatever reason.

    Reading through it all, though, all the accounts on the left side (the newer post) have two English words, usually separated by underscores, and 3-4 numbers on the end. Including the OP. So it looks like it’s just a coordinated bot army that reposts all content and then replicates all the old comments, character for character.

    • Parsani [love/loves, comrade/them]@hexbear.netOP
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      1 year ago

      The right is the original post, with a selection of comments from 10 months ago. The left is a repost of the same image 5 hours ago with a bunch of bots reposting the same comments from 10 months ago.

        • BountifulEggnog [she/her]@hexbear.net
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          1 year ago

          Advertisers buy the accounts, and use them to shill products. You know those posts where some product is being highlighted or is even just visible, someone comes along and asks what it is, and then someone links it? It’s so they can do that. Maybe even have a few sock puppets to talk about how much they like it. If these were all fresh accounts, the scheme is easy to see through. If you look through their post history and instead find a 5 year old account, with hundreds of comments (good comments, upvoted comments), you or anyone else is less likely to think it’s an advertisement. It just looks like a normal user.

          And reddit doesn’t care, because it’s more content for the real users to browse, and to show off for an investor.

          • ratboy [they/them]@hexbear.net
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            1 year ago

            That’s so fucking weird. I know there are bot accounts, especially with how many beautiful women seem to want my hot hot body on there or whatever, but to have them become so convincing with a huge post history is creepy as fuck. Wonder how many bots I’ve talked to

        • Astroturfing or advertising. They can generate a bunch of medium to high karma accounts with genuine looking post history, then sign a deal with an advertising firm or lobby group to make posts on their behalf. They’ll steal a bunch of posts like OP’s then start posting stuff like “Biden is actually the most progressive president” and fill the comment section with some propaganda. This site sells a range of services.

    • AssortedBiscuits [they/them]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      The left column is all bots. You can tell because their usernames are all [word][word][numbers]. But notice how two usernames on the right column fit the same exact pattern. There’s a good chance they are bots as well.

  • betelgeuse [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    Reddit is just 30 people talking to about 2 million bots. The bots are trying to accumulate enough karma so the account is valuable to advertisers. Reddit gets engagement so they don’t care. Advertisers get high-clout “real people” accounts. And the techno-scavengers make a few hundred dollars or a few thousand per year.