That was true a decade ago
Ever since the War Lizard Gaming Forum shutdown Reddit has been 99% bot content
It has been for a long time.
The theory of the empty internet is looming. ;)
Two questions:
- How can you be sure they’re bots?
- Assuming you can be sure (which I entirely doubt), how do you detect and ban them in a way they can’t come back?
- There are patterns of bot-posters, as well as the fact that in many cases the content exists elsewhere online and was copied.
- You can’t really. While you can ban individual accounts, they are able to make more, as I’ve said before it’s very easy to evade bans in ways that prevent easy ban evasion detection on Reddit’s part. It’s also likely that if Reddit is doing it they won’t enforce ban evasion against bots, though I find that option less likely.
the average redditor will still insist on appending “Reddit” onto Google searches since it “lets them see real human opinions” only because they can’t discern obvious botting from genuine human interactions
A lot of the botting is just copy and pasting previous actual human topics and comments though, so they’re not really wrong.
Actual bot created content is pretty boring, and never “contributes” in a way that would make for a useful Google result. Your Google result may be a bot’s comment, but if that comment is answering a question of some kind there’s a 99% chance the comment was originally written by a human.
copying and pasting a comment is still less genuine, since that promotes stale and outdated information. It can also create the false idea of a “widely held” opinion rather than a single person’s opinion copied a dozen times.