I hear people talk about bots posting on Reddit. How do they work and what’s the purpose. Who makes them? Sorry I’m middle aged and I’m very confused.
I hear people talk about bots posting on Reddit. How do they work and what’s the purpose. Who makes them? Sorry I’m middle aged and I’m very confused.
Comments
I’d like to know as well…
Bots are automated systems that query all of reddit and do a specific job. They are most commonly triggered if certain conditions are met. For example, If your were to type: “!remindme 1 week” a bot would come remind you in one week. The !remindme is the summons for the bot, the time duration tells the bot how long to wait before it reminds you. Theres also things like a haiku bot where If it detects a haiku it will tell you. Basically they are just silly scripts people have written for a hyper specific designated task
Bots are computer programs that control accounts that automatically post comments. This can go from very basic mass-spamming the same comment over and over again, or they can be smarter, or use AI, to really write sophisticated comments or posts that can almost not be distinguised from being a real person.
Why would someone do this? There are quite some reasons.
The first is collecting Reddit karma points to build up a “trustworthy looking” account to then sell for money. These accounts are usually then used for the rest of the points i’m about to mention.
Another reason can be advertising a product, or, and this is usually what most people refer to when they talk about bots on reddit: political influence and spreading propaganda.
When you read comments on Reddit, you usually don’t even question if it’s being written by a person. Let’s say you see thousands of comments supporting something a big political person did, your opinion of that might get skewed to agree with them. Now what if those thousands of comments are written programatically by a bot, or by AI, all within the span of a second?
There are also good bots that perform certain actions on Reddit like setting reminders like another commenter mentioned.
Hope that explanation helps.
I’m a software engineer so if you have more questions, feel free to ask.