• Geekmonster_@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    Hm. I looked around while I was blanking my posts and comments and I feel there’s a lot more “activity” in some subreddits, but it feels bot driven. Many of the accounts I looked at were relatively new, like less than a year old. Maybe they were real users, but it certainly didn’t feel like it to me.

    Anyone else taken a peek?

    • Master@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      I feel the same way. A ton of the top front page posts are just repeated slightly changed comments by less than a year old accounts with almost no posts or karma. It’s a very weird vibe over there right now and I’m pretty sure even though activity is up… human activity is dramatically down except for smaller subs (which seem to have unique content with not a lot of bot activity).

      • averyminya@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

        I think a large part of it honestly is just new users not understanding that they get to pick their usernames. By default now when you create a reddit account, it gives you a username (with editable text box) and gives you a space to input your email.

        What they don’t tell you is that you don’t have to fill out the email line and that you can edit your suggested username. Well, at least this was the case a year or maybe two ago, that was the last time I created an alt on Reddit.

        But as a result of Reddit getting more popular and widely known, more people unfamiliar with it are making accounts not knowing they can be using, not Revered_Longitude2893 or Ad_Internement759. It’s not necessary bots, it’s just Reddits shitty auto-naming that gives it’s users basically the same names.

        Seriously, the number of Relevant_{word}{numbers} on Reddit within the last year is astounding. I’ve noticed it too.

        But many of them are actually people if you engage with them. Sometimes it’s questions in PM, because they’re used to apps where you DM people instead of publicly sharing information.

        That’s not to say that all of them are human, for sure some are bots. Those often seemed to get called out for just copying other comments as well. And it’s definitely not a good look to make your new users look like bots.

        Overall terrible decisions leading to what happened this month. It’s been on this track for a while, it sucks.