Technology

I suspect there is a strong likelihood that this is what has happened. At the very least Reddit clearly is not doing enough to combat them given how easily I was able to find so many bots.

I was trying to investigate it further as I had found some older banned accounts which were doing something similar and which I could provably connect to a marketing firm. So they are another potential suspect for the newer bots however in the midst of trying to browse accounts and connect the dots Reddit went and patched the workaround I was using to search the hidden posts.

Now when these bots hide their post history there is no way of finding it on Reddit and it really wouldn't be obvious to casual users that they are bots so this form of marketing could be extremely effective and very predatory. If they aren't behind the bots they sure do seem to be making a lot of changes which actively empower them.

Before they patched it I saved a lot of bot posts containing links for a few smaller companies which had previously tried to promote their business on Reddit themselves. So I suspect those companies have signed up for an advertising package but it's just a question of whether that package is with Reddit themselves or with another company. If I can get enough attention on this I might try contacting them to ask.

It makes a lot of sense that they would.

Especially since I believe other major social media companies (Facebook; the service formerly known as Twitter) don’t care at all about bots and seem to want to use them as valid replacements for swathes of users or content generators.

Yep. Hiding post history pretty much makes Reddit useless as anything but a propaganda / astroturfing tool targeting idiots. It used to be pretty easy to identify shills and bots, and the only thing they achieved here is making it hardier to do that. Clearly that was the intent.

Yeah, the general-purpose or "default" subs were always terrible. I haven't completely left reddit yet because of some very specific communities that don't have, and probably never will have, a fediverse equivalent, and they don't seem to be too much of a target for AI bots, but I am starting to notice how social media influencers are affecting the population as a whole. But maybe that's just the cloud I'm shaking a fist at.

Browsing the relationship subs on reddit will affect your mental health. Disfunctional people writing hate fanfics of fake versions of themselves.

People on reddit always make the assumption that bots are all going to be angry divisive posts or posts advertising products but this is by far the most common form of reddit bot I see: the kind that just posts a bunch of one sentence generic positivity comments for easy upvotes where every post has the exact same grammatical format. My favorite is when like four of them post in the same thread with barely reworded versions of the same comment. I've gotten a good read on them at this point and I notice them constantly.

True, but it used to be made up by people looking for an ego boost. Now there's an additional monetary incentive behind it. Look no further than Twitter for an example of that.