/r/botwatch
Dedicated to the continued interest, observation, discussion, and study of the bots that dwell in reddit.
This reddit is dedicated to the continued interest, observation, discussion and study of reddit bot accounts and related topics.
Bots:
Others:
/r/botwatch
I'm tired of low quality content and would like to use an extension or something that can make suspected bot accounts. Something like how there were extensions that could mark fake reviews on Amazon.
Holy shit, I don't even know where to put this.
I'd never heard of a sub called theviralthings before like, yesterday. Now I'm seeing it on the front page every couple of hours.
I got curious and sorted the sub by its top posts ever. Literally all of them are bot accounts. I got bored after checking like 20 of them. They're usually 2-8 years old, one comments, then they just woke up a few months ago and started being active. Virtually none of them have a comment history older than 10 days. For some reason they're also so subbed to aita sub. All of them. I'm sure more posts will be human/organic soon, now that they've kind of forced their way into awareness.
I checked the mods, and at least 2 of the 3 are bots too. They constantly post random, generic comments like "wow so cute" and "I love this so much" all the time.
Something maybe even more strange though; I tried to start writing this comment in one of the threads on the sub, and it wouldn't allow me to type the name of the sub! Lol how tf is that possible? I just kept trying to type the "v" in the name and it would just leave a blank space over and over. I had to draft this in my email. I'm also pretty sure I was muted from the sub earlier today after I replied to someone that pointed out to me that the OP was an obvious bot. I had a somewhat controversial comment and 4 replies every time I refreshed, then it just suddenly stopped, and no more change in my comment karma. Clearly not an organic change over a few moments.
I know there's a ton of bots on Reddit, and many puppet accounts and whatever. But has anyone actually seen a whole sub forcefully generated in weeks, created by bots, modded by bots, and used by bots on this level? What's the point, to have unfeterred access to pumping up accounts to have credibly later? Is this about to become common here?
I'm no conspiracy theorist, but I'm trying to think of where to post this as I write it out. Lots of subs have rules against referring to Reddit in a submission, or meta posts or whenever. But the admins must be able to see this happening in the backend, right?
So weird and unsettling. I hate that it's so easy to influence people.
Asking the person on reddit, "What is my username?", comes back with the same one most the time. Can we confirm that these users created the bots that use AI to trick you into believing they are real?! It's crazy. Trick of the trade, ask them if they can get your username right!
Okay, I feel older than I actually am because I'm asking this question. I understand that bots moderate subreddits, but are there more uses to these bots? I've seen people literally summon a bot to do something funny or to explain something. I absolutely don't understand, nor do I know where to look to understand Reddit bots. Are these bots usually just used for a specific purpose?
I'm hoping someone can give me a straightforward explanation of how to use these bots. I see people calling on bots to do stuff, but I have no idea how to do it or what bots can even do. Can someone please share their knowledge and help me get started?
This is the first bot i have encountered and gotten such a response out of
Spreadsmile
Its all bots, every top post right now is from accounts that are a few days old
All following the usual strategy of poating a few comments then begin posting posts, each some removes comments so auto mods somewhat catch them
Im assuming the sub was made by these bot pushers
Its always these positivity subs and animal subs infested with bot farmers
So I noticed that once everyone started saying "weird" all of a sudden a month or so ago that there was some repeated instances where someone would post some political post (a lot of times on local, regional subs) and then there would be HUNDREDS of very short, but repetitive replies that would have the words "weird" or "creepy" in them, but mostly "weird". It very much seemed like the typical bot responses you see on places like reddit and youtube.
After seeing this enough I decided to start replying to them with a simple "They said the word!" response to see if these were accounts with actual people using them. I did this once and probably replied about a hundred times manually to these posts (there were literally hundreds of them) and finally got tired and stopped. After a week there were no downvotes, no upvotes, no replies....nothing. The kind of thing you'd expect if the account was automated and a real person was not actually using it. Looking back now a month later, still the same thing.
Then I randomly stumbled into another political post this week (I usually try to avoid them), same thing....this time I got lazy and just replied to maybe 30 of them. 2 days later same thing, no downvotes...no upvotes...no replies. I did manage to get an ACTUAL reply on one of them, which was then massively downvoted (this could just be that for some reason more people saw it or maybe this person is a participant in some kind of astroturfing and shared my reply for a downvoting brigade?)
Here's a screenshot of my reply history in case they get wise and decide to start downvoting all of them to cover tracks:
The interesting thing that I found was that spot checking some of these accounts they appear to have genuine-looking posts in non-political subs. However, just thinking critically here, what are the odds that an account that's normally active wouldn't reply or down or upvote a response to them after a month? What are the odds that ALL the accounts like that wouldn't respond after a month? I'd say pretty slim, personally. Makes me wonder if some of these accounts have AI-driven activity on them.
In my quest to find a wallet that could also hold an airtag, I came across this post. The entire comment section are bots. Any information about this brand or product niche on reddit is astroturfed to the tits. So much so that they pollute even regular wallet recommendation posts. There are multiple other instances of this company doing the exact same thing on different subreddits. This is a documented phenomenon with these types of wallets specifically.
More examples:
Ok I came across this post and thought something looked weird/off about OP's pic, and went on a crazy deep dive just now.
I noticed their account name "penelope nadia" but their name in their bio is "jenny", and then I scrolled down and saw a recent comment she made saying her name was Allison. Then I started scrolling through all their comments and its just HUNDREDS of comments & posts a day, and many of the comments on her past posts lead to deleted posts. Comments consist of lots of "thanks hun!" and heart emojis and basic thankful responses and compliments, just all happening at the same time for hours a day every day.
At first I thought the pic of her was an AI generated image, idk something about it just looks off. But AI detectors say its most likely not AI. So I then image reverse searched. This woman's pictures are being used across several karma farming accounts, but no mention of any only fans which I found kinda surprising. These are two profiles I found with only a few minutes of reverse image search:
[profile 2](https://www.reddit.com/user/cuterossyy/), [profile 3](https://old.reddit.com/user/TwoSending/)
BUT THEN I found [this youtube channel](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCSedCstBm1e934xlMHvWi7g) with one of the womans pics as the pfp, clicked the "all my links" in the bio, and BOOM. Onlyfans link.
I still can't quite figure out why all of this seems so off to me. I can't tell if this woman is even the one controlling the OF account or if its a catfish. Based off of the consistencies in her teeth, and the scar on her arm being the same in all the pics of her, I do think these are pics of a real girl that exists somewhere. But in a lot of her pictures her face looks really different, so I'm thinking she uses a program like FaceApp to enhance her features to the level that its a bit inconsistent and unrecognizable.
Idk I just thought this whole thing was a fun deep dive. What do you guys think? Catfishing onlyfans? Are these accounts using her photos attempting to advertise to the same OF account? Idk why I'm so fascinated with this LOL.
EDIT: Just noticed THIS linked in the twosending profile, and it links to the same onlyfans. Odd because normally women advertising OF don't have private instagram accounts, because that would typically be used as another place to solicit for more subscribers.
It would be great if you could drop any comment in this dedicated test post, it will then attempt to flair you as per its findings:
reddit.com/r/EuropeEats/comments/1deuoo0/test_area_51_for_europeeats_home_bot/
If it's wrong you may smirk and walk away, or comment on its stupidity :)
Thanks for any participation!
I noticed some strange behavior when two highly upvoted videos which were submitted near the same time were both deleted:
u/GameLeley and u/RosyViva
Both accounts created on the same day
Both accounts have no comment history before this week
Both accounts posted a single submission today that gained a lot of karma, then deleted the post ( https://old.reddit.com/r/Unexpected/comments/1f72mez/wheres_my_sandwich/ and https://old.reddit.com/r/Unexpected/comments/1f74hos/the_comedian_thought_he_had_the_upper_hand/ )
Both accounts then posted in r/WhatIsMyCQS/ with the subject 'test' - this subreddit is designed to score users (probably mostly bots) on their participation score for reddit.
Between r/WhatIsMyCQS and r/CQS there have been about 150 test posts within the last 24 hours. Clicking on many of the usernames and investigating shows strange, botlike behavior (lots of karma but all submissions deleted, WordWord or WordWordNumber usernames, accounts created within the last few months, etc)
I don't know if Reddit admins care about bots, but I'd hate to see the Dead Internet theory become real sooner than it has to.
https://www.reddit.com/user/RadiantRaptureee/
Horny me spent 5 minutes chatting before something felt off. This thirst trap uses AI in chat and I was pretty impressed... or horny. Then sobered up after my little dude was done.
I didn't know which other subs to put this in, but I think some of you would enjoy. I tried breaking it with the "help" and "agent" trick, tried m3ss4g1ng like that and also tried speaking some Spanish.
Anyway... enjoy or if you manage to break the bot to go off the sexual script, I'd love to know what you did.
This reddit user: u/cleverman72 has an extreme amount of post and comment karma. Account one year old. And bot a single genuine human comment I could find anywhere in the comments history.
Just curious because I have started investigating every post with a headline these days.
You reply to a comment to have that bot translate the comment and other branching comments before it. You comment under a post to translate the post. Reddit actually had this feature for mobile but they scrapped it for some reason.
Hi, im new here, on our subreddit we are having issues regarding photosensitive videos and I'd like to know if anyone here knows of a bot that is able to spot easily these videos and remove them or at least ping them to us in modmail or through report button