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.

  • AwkwardLookMonkeyPuppet@lemmy.worldEnglish
    5·
    2 days ago

    There would be tons of downside if they revealed the bot count. Their website would probably crash and burn. I think it’s well past 50% now. Well past.

  • fool@programming.dev
    15·
    3 days ago

    Everyone’s speculating so I’ll put in something concrete:

    About 3 months ago, r/wholesomememes mods clamped down on karma-farm bots as hard as they could…

    causing no new posts to appear for two entire days.

    Hey there friends! It’s only been a few days since we started cracking down on the spam bots and excessive reposts that have been plaguing r/WholesomeMemes - and now there is nothing left! –mod

    • jrs100000@lemmy.worldEnglish
      51·
      3 days ago

      That was reposts as well. Its not like anyone was wasting their life making fresh Facebook grade memes for that that cesspit.

  • Majestic@lemmy.ml
    4512·
    3 days ago

    “Foreign bad actors” Sigh. This is propaganda framing.

    The fact that reddit is astroturfed by the US government, US actors like Hillary’s campaign in 2016, etc is very well known. Reddit even did an oopsie many years ago admitting that the most active reddit city was a US air force base with influence operations located there, aka psyops, aka propaganda bots.

    If it has foreign “bad actors” they don’t control the narrative, they don’t control the main big subs, they don’t have an in with the admin team, they don’t run even a large minority of bots.

    If these mythical creatures people like you believe in (as a result of the US policy of always accuse your enemies of what you’re doing to hide it better) to pretend that the problems are all those evil foreigners do exist they exist as grains of sand caught in a mighty torrential river of US propaganda machines and influence operations. They exist hopeless. Helpless. With no friends on the admin team unlike the US propagandists, fighting a pointless fight where they are almost certainly subject to frequent, near immediate bans after mass downvotes by controlled moderators and/or mods who just are that happy to prevent any viewpoint but the US one from existing.

    Even framing your question like this is a massive pushing of US propaganda. This isn’t so much a question as a weaponized trojan horse that starts from the point of view of the people who control the most bots and the narrative totally on reddit.

    The only thing approaching foreign, non-US “bad actor” astroturfing and botting would have to be the zionist bot effort which is admin and main subs moderation team backed and also backed by the US government by the way who doesn’t care to get upset about it or raise it as an issue and demand it stop because they’re supplying weapons to that genocide.

    I mean the way you state it is literally the line being pushed by US government censorship proponents who are angry any foreign voices, any voices but their own are getting through.

  • stembolts@programming.dev
    372·
    3 days ago

    Just an opinion from someone who has been around the internet for a long while. It wouldn’t surprise me if most of the comments are bots. I remember what it was like to interact with humans, even dumb humans, and they aren’t nearly as blatantly agenda-driven as commenters on what I’d call “visible social media”.

    There are plenty of people who have a vested interest in disrupting means of communication and organization and they are investing a great deal in “false idea proliferation”.

    My 0.02¢.

    Oh, you asked for a percentage, in the popular subs? 80+%. In niche subs that don’t affect the Overton Window? 5-30%. And yes, these numbers are favricated outward from my butt hole.

    • Che Banana@beehaw.org
      9·
      3 days ago

      Probably on the nose.

      Source: former forum user that moved to Facebook during the consolidation that moved to reddit during the monitization that moved to the fediverse during the enshitification.

      I have no nostalgia about leaving sites that turn to shit or become rage bait click holes. It’s just stupid time wasting media.

    • Coskii@lemmy.blahaj.zone
      6·
      3 days ago

      You take your fractional pennies and get out of here with those rough guesses I can’t refute or deny!

      I’d honestly be surprised if a majority of any social space was bots… However I do believe a majority of initial posts are bot generated. Especially for news based spaces. It just makes sense to plug in a bot to whatever biased news source you subscribe to and just have it post new articles every 5 minutes.

      Much like the average American voter, I believe in that 50% silent users who are often forgotten. 25% active users, and that other 25% can be whatever ghosts in the system the OP is after.

      My numbers are also butthole deriven.

  • Margot Robbie@lemm.ee
    15·
    3 days ago

    I’m a foreign good actor (to non-Australians), does that count?

    Not to brag or anything, but I was nominated for a couple of acting awards in recent years.

  • jrs100000@lemmy.worldEnglish
    221·
    3 days ago

    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.

    • stembolts@programming.dev
      2·
      3 days ago

      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.

      • jrs100000@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        3 days ago

        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.

        • stembolts@programming.dev
          2·
          2 days ago

          You make a good point… In general, no one cares enough to track all this down. That is true. So that makes me wonder… who does/would care? So in a capitalist system, until the day the flow of money is impacted, generally nothing changes.

          So if Reddit really is all (or vastly) bots, then aren’t advertisers paying to advertise to bots? And if that is true, at a certain point some metrics will show the yield on their investments is bunk.

          Maybe that is how it collapses. I can hope.

    • slowmotionrunner@lemmy.sdf.orgOP
      12·
      3 days ago

      In another comment I was accused of being a brainwashed American, so take this for what it is, but some posts — mostly of a political nature — just seem to defy any mainstream thinking across the spectrum. Looking at some user profiles when I come across these, it seems their post history is entire based around fueling arguments, with no agenda, other than breed discontent.

  • Ibex@lemmy.world
    11·
    3 days ago

    It’s probably higher than that. Every time I comment on there it feels like a play with the way people act and respond. Like it’s not real, or they have a script to follow. No real person would act the way most Redditors operate.

    • bobs_monkey@lemm.ee
      5·
      3 days ago

      Also important to remember that karma farming is a thing over there, alongside the circle jerk. There’s thread after thread of people just saying the same shit over and over because it’s guaranteed karma.

    • Pechente@feddit.orgEnglish
      4·
      3 days ago

      Sure this can be bots but at least when I was still active this behavior was also just karma whoring by real people. Comment fast before the thread „expires“ and become one of the top rated comments.

      • Otter@lemmy.caEnglish
        3·
        3 days ago

        I see a lot of this, where it’s become a mix of

        • bots
        • real people that comment like bots

        It comes up on the Reddit moderation side where I look into an account assuming it’s a spam bot but it’s not. There is a certain voice or style that’s similar between the two groups of accounts

    • jrs100000@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      3 days ago

      It makes sense that a vote based platform, where users encounter direct positive and negative reinforcement with every interaction, would tend to developing repetitive conversation patterns over time, even if it were populated entirely with humans.

  • hansolo@lemm.eeEnglish
    4·
    3 days ago

    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.

  • thezeesystem@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    109·
    3 days ago

    Wait? “Foreign bad actors”? You don’t realize that the bad actors are domestic? Through the US government? Hence the whole “china bad” narrative.

    For how much people on Lemmy who thinks “China bad” it’s just as bad as reddit for domestic bad actors.

    • slowmotionrunner@lemmy.sdf.orgOP
      2·
      2 days ago

      Several other comments called me out for the same thing and you are right, I didn’t mean to imply that there are not domestic bad actors also.

      • sunzu2@thebrainbin.org
        1·
        2 days ago

        we have both domestic and foreign threat actors, they target us for different reasons but tactics are similar.