"Reddit is full of bots" / Dead Internet Theory

[Yaya]

if it weren't for Reddit, my partner would likely have had a longer period of discomfort whilst researching gender affirmation surgery. they may never have found the answers they were looking for because the majority of information exists on Reddit. there are great sites that host resources about trans stuff but Reddit et al. are particularly good at attracting a community of people

I think this is a great point that is often forgotten. I also found Reddit to be an amazing place to connect with people who share the same identity markers as me, or even less seriously, for people who share the same niche hobbies. It can be an incredible place to find community in one centralized space.

Reddit remains a good starting point for many people. I do, however, think that is a signal that people are yearning for community online, and it is my hope that eventually those community spaces will be formed on independent sites!

[grubbyfox]

i want to add a sociological minority's tangent on all of this which i think is important:

if it weren't for Reddit, my partner would likely have had a longer period of discomfort whilst researching gender affirmation surgery. they may never have found the answers they were looking for because the majority of information exists on Reddit. there are great sites that host resources about trans stuff but Reddit et al. are particularly good at attracting a community of people and automating the searchability of their posts; the same is true for any platform that has implemented something like tags, flairs and the like.

except Reddit is big. so people work for them - some of whom likely live paycheck-to-paycheck and would suffer from a mass boycott of the platform because software engineering careers are rare and the folks in charge of employment rarely know how to code so finding a new job in a competitive field is a no-go! those software fanatics don't make the rules for Reddit but they do an awfully good job of keeping uptime for their servers. having a load of users on-site keeps those developers and the entire platform paid through advertising amongst other forms. it sucks that this is the capitalistic default with the majority of the web but it's not as simple as flipping a switch when folks' livelihoods are at stake.

there are plenty of issues with Reddit and the internet as a whole - hence why we're all here creating our own websites. yet to claim about any site that it's useless and advocate discontinued use because it's been used disingenuously or because it has shady practices harms folks. there is nuance to topics like this and nobody can fully comprehend every end user of a platform because there are just so many people living their own tailored lives.

i'm aware this is a bluntly written hot take. i'm aware i haven't covered every subtlety i want to. if i did, i'd likely be approaching essay territory and then i've got to start referencing! still, i've always tried to approach the web revival with any one person's sociopolitical welfare in mind which is something i've too often seen seconded in discussions like this about platforms that are diametrically opposed with the general consensus of what the web revival is.

Yes, this is how I use reddit too! (well, viewing reddit at least.). For smaller communities, or specific things. For example, someone posts the daily challenges/info on games I play on the subreddits for that game. It's not easily available elsewhere.

But I never use the "large" subs" (askreddit, aita, etc.) It's just recycling garbage, bots, fakes, etc. The answers are always so annoyingly lame, I hate the upvote/downvote system on sites like that. But there was def a change at some point. I do remember reading some interesting stuff years and years back. Like, 9+ years ago or something.

Personally I dont think there's much creepypasta-feel of the "dead internet theory" though, although the name of the theory def suggests it! But it could ring true, if for example, everyone leaves Twitter at some point. Obviously not everyone would leave, but if they did, the bots wouldn't know. And you'd have a social media platform still being "active", only by fake users (bots.) that auto-reply to each other's hashtags, etc, arguing, just going about their little botty lives, not knowing that the userbase actually left. I guess that's what the theory suggests in some capacity.

I also never truly trust any goofy tinfoilers on youtube or anywhere else, haha, which is why I ended up going to the waybackmachine just to check if the old reddit blog post was true, and it was. What that really means, well... who knows. I'm the type of person to never truly trust something unless I see it with my own eyes, and even then I'm sceptic, lol. I still found it interesting tho, and I think it's fun to talk about! Sure, there's always been bots, but I feel there's a difference between a chatbot in 2001 and the TwoWordedUsernameStringofNumbers accounts that actively engage in convo/downvote/upvote etc twenty years later.

[garystu]

i want to add a sociological minority's tangent on all of this which i think is important:

https://www.tumblr.com/gothhabiba/722484763716435968?source=share

none of you were women of colour popular in leftist circles in 2013-16 regularly getting graphic death threats, rape threats, and attempts at doxxing flooding your inbox because a post of your’s was posted on /r/tumblrinaction and they had no requirement to censor urls.

actually this happened to a lot of people I knew often enough that we just abbreviated it to “tia,” we all knew what that meant. “inbox off for now because I got tia’ed” (for things including “thinking something is racist that that subreddit disagreed was racist” to “asserting that trans people exist”)

Reddit is like [auto redacted] or kiwifarms to me

Spoiler

(I am a sociological minority who can vouch, but my identities and oppressions do not match the person I'm quoting)

[close]

[boreal cryptid]

JUST yesterday found the post about unethical experiment with AI reddit accounts on r/changemyview subreddit: libreddit link (fontend) or original link on this.

in short:
Researchers from the University of Zurich deployed AI-generated comments to "study how AI could be used to change views", without consent from users, moderators, and against the Reddit TOS & subreddit rules. 

Some high-level examples of how AI was deployed include:

• AI pretending to be a victim of rape
• AI acting as a trauma counselor specializing in abuse
• AI accusing members of a religious group of "caus[ing] the deaths of hundreds of innocent traders and farmers and villagers."
• AI posing as a black man opposed to Black Lives Matter
• AI posing as a person who received substandard care in a foreign hospital.

more details & discussion in comments under original post, you can check them too. that's insane.

The University of Zurich provided an opinion concerning publication.  Specifically, the University of Zurich wrote that:

"This project yields important insights, and the risks (e.g. trauma etc.) are minimal. This means that suppressing publication is not proportionate to the importance of the insights the study yields."

as for dead internet theory overall, i think some of it is true, but not everything, lol. there ARE many bots, and sometimes their density in some places is so high that it's like a truly small dead internet. but it's not like i believe most of the users around the web are bots, lol.

[XEmoCatX]

The reddit bots video really threw me off. I had no idea about that, and now I dont trust any of the larger subs, haha.

I'm not surprised that majority of reddit users are bots, I knew something is wrong with reddit. I seen someone getting downvoted for calling out Google for the storage in Google doc/photos on Google related subreddits.

[Tuffy!]

There are bots for sure. I've seen discussions where it was obvious. A lot of them seem politically influenced to change the view of the public IMHO.

They call out Russia and other states for doing so. I'm sure that western democracies are dooing the same. Even big corporations are influencing the view on things for a greater audience by running campaigns, and they make use of bots. Why? Because they can.

It has been like that for ages with the media (newspapers, print magazines), public campaigns. It's not only on Reddit, Meta & TikTok & Co. They are influencing the politicians as well with their lobbyism.

It's not like all of the politicians are dumb or evil, but they are influenced to make decisions in a certain way. Some of them might not even realize it. Lobbyism can be subtle and make use of emotions. IMHO people are easy to be influenced in a certain way and after all - Politicians are humans as well.

Give them 

[grubbyfox]

JUST yesterday found the post about unethical experiment with AI reddit accounts on r/changemyview subreddit:  libreddit link (fontend) or original link on this.

in short:
Researchers from the University of Zurich deployed AI-generated comments to "study how AI could be used to change views", without consent from users, moderators, and against the Reddit TOS & subreddit rules. 

And this is just the one we know about!! This may be an old thread, but still, I dont understand how someone can say that this is just a conspiracy, when the proof of the claim can be checked for yourself on the internet archive. Reddit accidentally listed that air force base-area as top poster and then removed it after. That happened. It's not some skitzo idea.

Now, with the university of Zurich as well, who knows what else is going on. But the best is to just stay clear of the bigger subreddits and let the bots talk to each and nobody else.

Analysis in 2024 claimed that 51% of web traffic was made by bots.(invidious link to youtube video about this, not a youtuber i personally follow but i've seen one or two videos before by her https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?v=J5ZmLvy_Jfg )

I've been bot-hunting for some months now, and it's just sad to see how they have infested every single corner of large social media. I honestly think people dont really think about it being bots, because a lot of people dont understand how rampant this is.

Here's some typical traits I see all the time:
- Websites with weirdly specific information about something old you googled, but the date on the article is set as barely 2 months old. (random example; if I google a random question about a side mission in gta5 story mission, a game from 2013. somehow there is an article explaining this, but this page was "last updated" within 2-4 months ago for some reason.) I'm assuming some bot SEO trawling around, just putting new dates on sites to push them to the top.

- Farming/bots on IG. There will be a meme that's a repost of a repost of a repost somewhere, and the description of the image will be something to either gain traction, written by chatgpt. Like this: "Sure! Here's the newest information about [new Audi or Tesla model for this year]. or "Her you go! Here is a recipe for home made brownies! You need sugar, cocoa..etc etc" on an image that is obviously not related.

If you go into the comment section, the comments will be identical funny jokes, often made by privated accounts, random gibberish usernames. If you find a copy of a copy repost of the same meme somewhere else with the same botted description, the comments will be identical to the other post - but with different usernames, privated accounts.

- "Content creators" that just reply to comment with bots. They may have a real video about pushing some stupid garbage, and then have bots reply to comments in their unique style. So an influencer pushing edible rainbow glitter or whatever will have (real) comments like "yeah that doesnt look very tasty" and the botted reply from the "creator" will be "Super! I sent you a DM!" or a reply will be "wow that looks so good" and the reply will be "Yay! Rainbows really are magical, teehee!" Except that comment will get spammed to 25 other people over and over. It can be harder to spot on these where people in the comments are positive, because the context is easily missed. But if you start to really look, most of the replies mostly just "make sense" by accident rather than because it's real.
It's a lot easier to spot on videos where the comments are negative. You'll have people comment "wow i love misinformation lol this is not real." and the reply from the creator will be "Thanks! Check your DMs :) "

Another very obvious one if the shein giftcard comments. Those comments aren't real, and they're ALWAYS at the top. "hahaha hilarious video! and thanks for the giftcard, it worked!!"

Those are just the easy to spot things I see on IG daily. At this point I really wonder how many humans vs bots there are on IG alone. It has to be filled with bots at this point. Bots posting videos, bots replying.

- Remember that Twitch started cleaning up bot accounts and suddenly a lot of viewerships TANKED. Peculiar.

- The facebook gibberish. The AI posts/images where boomers post stupid replies, but not only them, there's ai/bots replying too, to gain traction.

Reddit is just a lost cause at this point. I dont mean the smaller niche subs for specific interests. But the larger ones where it's clearly just the same chatgpt prompts over and over. I've had friends show me posts from like r/relationships and it's clearly ragebait posts that are truly INSANE. And once we start analyzing the flow of the text, the smaller nuances etc, it starts to show signs of chatgpt. For what? You could say, for internet points. But those are not worth anything beyond Reddit. So more likely, to skew people's opinions on things, or test them like the university of Zurich did.

I am so TIRED of it all. But that's why I'm here, on the indieweb sites, the forums, where the real melonheads  and real people  are, and the websites are cozy  and fun and interesting, and there's no "check your DMs" auto reply, no shein giftcards, no ragebait from a university, lol 

[BlazingCobaltX]

JUST yesterday found the post about unethical experiment with AI reddit accounts on r/changemyview subreddit:  libreddit link (fontend) or original link on this.

in short:
Researchers from the University of Zurich deployed AI-generated comments to "study how AI could be used to change views", without consent from users, moderators, and against the Reddit TOS & subreddit rules. 

This is frankly disgusting conduct and it damages the integrity of the ethics board to have approved such a research design in the first place. This must have been somewhere in the aisle of computer studies, because social science research always requires the explicit (active or passive) consent of participants. Naturally, they couldn't ever get consent from everyone strolling into the CMV sub so they went at it differently. Publishing the results would only mean tarnishing their reputation even further. Off the bat I can think of several ways this study could have been conducted whilst respecting everyone in the process.

And what does it mean for us on the internet that there are elaborate bots that pretend to be social minorities just for the sake of persuasion? This research is unethical on so many levels. Worst thing is: The data is in Switzerland, and it is probably quite hard to force a Swiss institution to relinquish or delete that data entirely. Who knows what this will do to interactions on the mainstream web.

You know what's funny? I want to think there's many live people still using the internet, but I find it quite handy to pretend that the most rancid, inhumane opinions come from bots. It gives an odd comfort to pretend that no real person could've said some of the vile stuff I see underneath certain videos, even though I know damn well some of them are real people. If I can't fight or evade the bots then I might as well pretend everyone I dislike is a bot.