33 upvotes, 2 direct replies (showing 2)
View submission: What we’re working on this year
So, not planning to do anything about the swarm of user-impersonating bots then?
This is such a trivial problem that users with no knowledge of the backend can spot it: a bot scans the thread for a highly upvoted comment and comments the same thing. This allows bots to accumulate a legitimate looking comment history and age, and by parroting legitimate looking activity they can engage in vote manipulation, spam referral product links, plant malware links, astroturf product promotion, or engage in other coordinated inauthentic activity in between legitimate looking mimicked comments.
I feel like this should be a priority, and really isn’t.
Comment by notbob1959 at 02/06/2022 at 20:48 UTC
10 upvotes, 1 direct replies
The bots I have seen do something a little different and are harder for the average user to spot. A regular user or one of the bots will repost a popular post and then three bots will copy a comment from an earlier post. To give you an idea of how bad this problem is this search[1] shows 100 comments I made just in the last 9 days identifying these bots.
Comment by Athleco at 03/06/2022 at 01:39 UTC
2 upvotes, 1 direct replies
What’s one of those subs that only allows bots to post? Those are scary real.