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.
Define “foreign”
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.
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So do you mean foreign as in not born here or foreign as in unusual/out of place
State-sponsored
why do you think they are state-sponsored
Nice try… North Korea. j/k. IDK man, because I watched “The Undeclared War”. Give it a look.
sorry I’m really new to all this
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.
Are you Bluey? That’s exciting!
Many such cases
Yay
Bluey is also from Queensland, so…close enough.
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)
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.
With you on this. As an old school netizen who watched digg enshitification that led me to reddit, then over the years was astonished about how extreme the rightward shift went… I mean the trump choo choo memes on the front page bought and paid for by Steve Bannon and other net savvy investors. It really went to absolute shit. When they banned the API it was a blessing in disguise cause no excuse to go back, especially with the lemmyverse.
TLDR fuck Reddit that platform is dead
i’ve likewise been moving from one social media platform onto another since things like bbs & icq were dominant; i used to believe that everything w money behind it eventually enshitified until i started seeing enshitification signs on the larger diet reddit instances like .world and lemm.ee
the diet reddit instances don’t have anywhere near the same financial backing that reddit or bluesky has; yet they do the same consent manufacturing and narrative shaping that reddit, bluesky and legacy media does.
and i wonder how its going to look in the future as the enshitification drives liberals to eventually abandon their diet reddit instances once they realize that reddit or bluesky can do “general interest” better than any lemmy instance ever can.
lemmy was built for political outcasts and i suspect that the original leftists instances will always stick around and continue to form new relationships with other leftists and other instances from non-mainstream political factions; but i’m going to assume that the sheer massive size of the general-interest/diet-reddit instances (relatively speaking) will have an impact nonetheless
I was on lemmy.world for a week. My goodness the astonishing degree of bad takes and western propaganda. Yeah, I mean. I hate the data silos but at least on lemmygrad and hexbear there’s a modicum of actual good faith dialogue.
Yep, I essentially use Lemmy.ml to correct misconceptions about Marxism, AES, etc and use my Hexbear account for actual discussion and furthering my understanding of Marxism via interacting to LG and HB.
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.
…interact with humans, even dumb humans…
Hi, it’s me, the dumb human.
Nice try bot.
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.
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.
Came here too say that.
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.
I was on there recently and saw the same LET THEM FIGHT GIF posted 12 times in the same thread and all of them had some number of upvotes
I can’t even understand what human would upvote the trash like that
Voters? Probably 99%. Commenters though? Like actual bots and LLMs and stuff like that? Very few, 1% rounded up, I’d think. You’re much more likely to encounter humans posing as unaffiliated random people as part of their job than LLMs doing the same.
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 :
- Metronomic (or)
- 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.
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.
My guess: (pure speculation)
Lemmy (edit: I mean the comment section) is probably at 25% government agents or people acting on behalf of governments including US, Russia, China, possibly other allies of the aforementioned.
Bots tho, probably few, maybe 10% or less. Most of the instances use manual applications, so hard to get bots through. You’d need to write a different “essay” for each application, also think of unique names that doesnt look bot generated.
If you look specifically in (edit: the comments section of) political threads, probably anywhere from 25% to 50% government agents.
Mainsteam social media like Reddit, probably at 25% to 50% bots pre-exodus, now it seem like 50% to 75% bots, the percentage of government agents are probably much lower, since unlike Lemmy where there are much less users, on reddit they wouldn’t have the manpower to post enough comments to manipulate the discussion, but they could just use bots instead, many of those bots are probably operated by governments. And on political subreddits, these numbers will skyrocket.
Thing thing about the internet, is you have to treat it as entertainment, not real source of unbiased information, especially not a forum where any rando can sign up.
I’m gonna restate what I said in another thread:
---
I’ve come up with a system to categorize reality in different ways:
Category 1: Thoughts inside my brain formed by logics
Category 2: Things I can directly observe via vision, hearing, or other direct sensory input
Category 3: IRL Other people’s words, stories, anecdotes, in face to face conversations
Category 4: Acredited News Media, Television, Newspaper, Radio (Including Amateur Radio Conversations), Telephone, Telegrams, etc…
Category 5: The Internet
The higher the category number, means the more distant that information is, and therefore more suspicious I am.
I mean like, if a user on Reddit (or any internet fourm or social media for that matter) told me X is a valid treatment for X disease without like real evidence, I’m gonna laugh in their face (well not their face, since its a forum, but you get the idea).
Lemmy is probably at 25% government agents or people acting on behalf of governments including US, Russia, China, possibly other allies of the aforementioned.
Come on: Lemmy isn’t nearly big enough for state actors to bother with—yet. In the social media space, Lemmy is a rounding error.
The military-intelligence-industrial complex is aware of the fediverse’s existence, though:
Atlantic Council » Collective Security in a Federated World (PDF)
Many discussions about social media governance and trust and safety are focused on a small number of centralized, corporate-owned platforms that currently dominate the social media landscape: Meta’s Facebook and Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, Reddit, and a handful of others. The emergence and growth in popularity of federated social media services, like Mastodon and Bluesky, introduces new opportunities, but also significant new risks and complications. This annex offers an assessment of the trust and safety (T&S) capabilities of federated platforms—with a particular focus on their ability to address collective security risks like coordinated manipulation and disinformation.
I mean more like comments, not the total users. Total user at 25% would be a lot of man power.
Like a post with 25 comments could have at least 7 comments be a government account, and it doesn’t take a lot of people. One new NSA or FSB hire can run 7 virtual machines to create Lemmy sockpuppet accounts to push whatever they want. Like… it only takes 1 out of the thousands of employees they have to run this. Lemmy is small enough to be doable.
I mean, if I wanted to troll, I could pull up 7 tor browser sessions and create accounts to post bad faith arguments, but I just don’t have the energy for it.
It certainly can be done, and without much effort, but there’s virtually no bang for that buck right now, because the audience is laughably small.
If it’s big enough for us, it’s big enough for state actors. They may not be putting in a ton of effort yet, but I’m sure they’re here.
Hilarious, and no. Turns out we’re all “handled” by legal authorities.
Most of our communities have different mods. Some were a bit overzealous at first (imo). It seems the whole instance doesn’t get much credit for avoiding the Reddit supermod situation and instead the whole instance is judged by whichever mod each user each dislikes the most.
I’m a foreign bad actor.
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.
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Yeah posts getting easily 100K+ upvotes in hours, I’ll say over 70%
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Probably a big chunk, thats why i left
foreign bad actors
Oh nice! More shitstirring. 😃👍
All of r/WorldNews
Fuck them
