• Anti-Face Weapon@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    My understanding of how this works is that that left one is real accounts making real comments, at least in the majority.

    Then when the link gets reposted, either by a bot or naturally, potentially depending on the title, the bots scrape the old comments and post them.

    It’s content farming. And Reddit is probably okay with this.

    • moriquende@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      The right one is the “real” accounts. Notice how the left one is newer and all the accounts have names ending with four digits, except where they aren’t copies from the right.

      • Sternout@feddit.de
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        6 months ago

        No, the left one is older and most the names in the right contain four numbers.

        What’s going on here?

        Maybe op updated the picture?

        • EldritchFeminity@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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          6 months ago

          I saw this exact same style of bot account years ago on Tumblr. They always follow the same naming scheme: one word or two words combined and then a string of 4 digits. I bet if you go to any of their profiles, you’ll find like 4 comments that are all copied from old threads and a bunch of upvotes on completely random subs, possibly even all of them being on other bot accounts’ posts and comments.

          The real question is whether they’re being used to fake activity on Reddit, sway public opinion by posting this sort of political slant, or will they later be used to advertise scams and this is just to make them seem legitimate.

          • sep@lemmy.world
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            6 months ago

            Why not all of the above? If you have a service, you want to sell it to as many customers as possible.

          • fine_sandy_bottom@discuss.tchncs.de
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            6 months ago

            I thought the names followed that format because that’s the format reddit used for suggestions when signing up.

            I think the accounts are kind of “warmed up” this way to make them harder for reddit to identify as bots when they’re used for vote manipulation.

            Like a bot that just voted in /r/politics threads world be easier to identify than one which comments here and there and gets a few upvotes itself.

      • bjorney@lemmy.ca
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        6 months ago

        Reddit probably omits bot accounts when it sells its data to AI companies

          • bjorney@lemmy.ca
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            6 months ago

            Reddit has access to its own data - they absolutely know which users are posting unique content and which user’s content is a 100% copy of data that exists elsewhere on their own platform

            • phdepressed@sh.itjust.works
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              6 months ago

              I know they could be I’m just not sure they’re that competent. These bots often aren’t single user or just copy paste either, there’s usually some effort to mix it up or change wording slightly. Reddits internal search function is infamously shit but they “know” which users are unlabeled bots with some effort put behind them?

              • brbposting@sh.itjust.works
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                6 months ago

                I figure it’s their absolute last priority. They might know rough bot #s, but haven’t built or don’t widely use takedown tools. There’s always an enhancement to deliver, and bots help their engagement metrics.

              • bjorney@lemmy.ca
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                6 months ago

                I know everyone here likes to circle jerk over “le Reddit so incompetent” but at the end of the day they are a (multi) billion dollar company and it’s willfully ignorant to infer that there isn’t a single engineer at the company who knows how to measure string similarity between two comment trees (hint: import difflib in python)

                • icydefiance@lemm.ee
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                  6 months ago
                  1. To compare every comment on reddit to every other comment in reddit’s entire history would require an index, and if you want to find similar comments instead of exact matches, it becomes a lot harder to do that efficiently. ElasticSearch might be able to do it, but then you need to duplicate all of that data in a separate database and keep it in sync with your main database without affecting performance too much when people are leaving new comments, and that would probably be expensive.
                  2. Comparing combinations of comments is probably impossible. Reddit has a massive number of comments to begin with, and the number of possible subtrees of those comments would just be absurd. If you only care about comparing entire threads and not subtrees, then this doesn’t apply, but I don’t know how useful that will be.
                  3. Programmers just do what they’re told. If the managers don’t care about something, the programmers won’t work on it.
                  • bjorney@lemmy.ca
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                    6 months ago

                    To compare every comment on reddit to every other comment in reddit’s entire history would require an index

                    You think in Reddit’s 20 year history no one has thought of indexing comments for data science workloads? A cursory glance at their engineering blog indicates they perform much more computationally demanding tasks on comment data already for purposes of content filtering

                    you need to duplicate all of that data in a separate database and keep it in sync with your main database without affecting performance too much

                    Analytics workflows are never run on the production database, always on read replicas which are taken asynchronously and built from the transaction logs so as not to affect production database read/write performance

                    Programmers just do what they’re told. If the managers don’t care about something, the programmers won’t work on it.

                    Reddit’s entire monetization strategy is collecting user data and selling it to advertisers - It’s incredibly naive to think that they don’t have a vested interest in identifying organic engagement

        • livus@kbin.social
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          6 months ago

          Doubt it, they are interwoven into almost any conversation with more than 70 comments.

          • bjorney@lemmy.ca
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            6 months ago

            If you have access to the entire Reddit comment corpus it’s trivial to see which users are only reposting carbon copies of content that appears elsewhere on the site

            • criitz@reddthat.com
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              6 months ago

              It’s probably not as easy as you imagine for reddit to identify and cleanse all bot content.

              • livus@kbin.social
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                6 months ago

                Of course it’s not. Nor do they want to.

                I think the person you’re talking to thinks all bots are like the easy ones in this screenshot.

              • bjorney@lemmy.ca
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                6 months ago

                Look at the picture above - this is trivially easy. We are talking about identifying repost bots, not seeing if users pass/fail the Turing test

                If 99% of a user’s posts can be found elsewhere, word for word, with the same parent comment, you are looking at a repost bot

                • criitz@reddthat.com
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                  6 months ago

                  That’s easy in an isolated case like this, but the reality of the entire reddit comment base is much more complex.

            • livus@kbin.social
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              6 months ago

              The low level bots in OPs screenshot, sure, because it’s identical. Not the rest.

              I used to hunt bots on reddit for a hobby and give the results to Bot Defense.

              Some of them use rewrites of comments with key words or phrases changed to other words or phrases from a thesaurus to avoid detection. Some of them combine elements from 2 comments to avoid detection. Some of them post generic comments like 💯. Doubtless there are some using AI rewrites of comments now.

              My thought process is if generic bots have been allowed to go so rampant they fill entire threads that’s an indication of how bad the more sophisticated bot problem has become.

              And I think @phdepressed is right, no one at reddit is going to hunt these sophisticated bots because they inflate numbers. Part of killing the API use was to kill bot detection after all.

              • bjorney@lemmy.ca
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                6 months ago

                Reddit has way more data than you would have been exposed to via the API though - they can look at things like user ARN (is it coming from a datacenter), whether they were using a VPN, they track things like scroll position, cursor movements, read time before posting a comment, how long it takes to type that comment, etc.

                no one at reddit is going to hunt these sophisticated bots because they inflate numbers

                You are conflating “don’t care about bots” with “don’t care about showing bot generated content to users”. If the latter increases activity and engagement there is no reason to put a stop to it, however, when it comes to building predictive models, A/B testing, and other internal decisions they have a vested financial interest in making sure they are focusing on organic users - how humans interact with humans and/or bots is meaningful data, how bots interact with other bots is not

    • Damage@feddit.it
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      6 months ago

      It’s account farming. They make fake accounts look legitimate so they can use them to influence opinions on the site.

      • livus@kbin.social
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        6 months ago

        They also use them in groups of 3 to lure people to malicious sites and scam sites. Especially fake merchandise sites.