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Asklemmy @lemmy.ml
slowmotionrunner @lemmy.sdf.org

What percentage of Reddit users are bots or foreign bad actors?

It probably seems weird asking this on Lemmy, but of course posting this on Reddit would get banned or taken down. Reddit doesn’t like being critical of Reddit. Anyways….

Over the last 10 years as a Reddit user I’ve believe the amount of accounts that are bots or foreign bad actors has tipped past 50%. I have no statistics to speak of, but would love if somebody did and could share.

Based purely on some of the conversations, posts, rage bait, strong ideologies, etc… I’m pretty convinced that a reasonable sample of humans could not or would not act the way they do on that platform. So often now I see posts that I feel are specifically attempting to sow discord and disagreement.

Does anyone else agree? What percent of users do you think are bots? Foreign bad actors?

Sadly, I think Reddit has no desire to find out or do anything about it. There would be no upside to them correcting their advertising numbers.

84 comments

  • I would bet the actual number of active bot accounts is probably lower than many people think. Maybe 20-30%. Those accounts are more active than humans though, maybe accounting for half of all the posts. Many of these bots arnt even proper LLMs, they are just scripts recycling generic comments, catch phrases and old memes and upvoting each other endlessly.

    • I suppose the spirit of the question was "volume of content" vs "volume of accounts". But there is a problem with loading a lot of content onto a singular account (from a bot detection PoV), and that is that it is easy to detect if an account is a bot if their post history is :

      1. Metronomic (or)
      2. Relentless in volume

      To solve that problem (aka bot camouflage), the maintainers of said bots would use volume of accounts as a disguise mechanism. For that reason I assume that the volume of bot accounts has to scale with the volume of "pushed content" as, in my assessment.. if I were running a bot network I'd want to be sure that my most-active bots were only 50-80% as prolific as known-human accounts.. then simply distribute your content across those "strategically-limited-spam-bots".

      So as a TLDR I guess what I'm saying is that the volume of accounts has to scale with the volume of influence assuming you'd want your influence to appear organic.

      The meta above this would be what, account creation monitoring? It's an interesting conflict. Influence peddlers vs bot detectors.

      What is gross to me is that platforms like Reddit appear to be catering to the influence peddlers. (or in the case of Facebook and Cambridge Analytica.. allying with and giving birth to said influence peddlers to the political gain of Zuckerberg's personal views on politics.)

      Should one person have such power? Probably not. Explains a lot of "unexplainable" occurrences happening.. back to back to back to back to..

      This is the modern incarnation of "billionaires buying newspapers" to maintain control of the narrative.

      • The problem is I dont think many of the accounts really care if their total account activity appears organic. They are mostly there to create volume, sometimes to puff up activity metrics, to amplify specific points and narratives, or simply to shut down conversation if it strays into the wrong topic. They know Reddit doesnt actually want to stop them, and the individual accounts rarely say anything interesting enough to justify human users taking the time to evaluate their post history.

  • Reddit is default "human advice" on what to buy, if you don't think it's crawling with companies bots as well

    (but feely wise, it's sub dependent, no one will go to small sub to influence 10 people, conversely big subs are shaped both via allowed topics and first-to-post, first-to-downvote races)

  • Im not even sure how normal people post on reddit. Everytime ive ever tried to post on there in a community that isn't tiny my post is automatically removed and sent to "manual approval" which never actually happens. it baffles me how a website that is so hard to post on remains popular.

  • There's a few other categories to consider.

    Of small niche subs I've moderated, there's maybe a 10 to 1 or higher ratio of non-active users to active. Look at the highest voted posts of all time or the last year in a sub. If the sub as 10K subscribers, the highest number of votes on any post might be 1K or so. Maybe far less.

    I saw on a couple of the sub's metrics that we would consistently gain 10-20 users a day, and maybe lose 1-3 subscribers daily. But with very little increased engagement. But so we would gain sometimes 500 or even 1000 users in a month, and nothing changes. Why? Always drove me crazy.

    A lot of real people start up accounts and quickly abandon them. A lot of bots sub every subreddit and do stupid things like comment when you're comment is a haiku. Every script kiddie that ever coded a broken bot that never worked right might still have 4 or 5 axcounts out there as a dead subscribers.

    And let's not forget the massive amount of people with multiple accounts (hi!) and the ones with sometimes severe mental health problems, wannabe trolls, and straight up Aholes trying to evade bans. There's likely more of these out there than actual malicious and active bots.

    As for actual malicious bots posting, it's likely very few, and limited to engagement on larger subs to drop parts of a larger group of talking points. But the places that normally go for that kind of thing also don't mind hiring a bunch of Nigerian 419 scammers to be real humans posting from the bot accounts sometimes.

84 comments