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.
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 :
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.
I woke up (from a blackout) on the hood of a car. A car that was stopped at a red light and wasn’t the car my friends were driving. I guess I leapt out of the backseat and rolled around on their hood? Idk, I blacked out again then came-to again rolling through some wet grass. Blacked out again and woke up on a couch.
Turns out that humans can teleport.
Want more details? Me too. But I have no idea. It was more than two decades ago and I no longer drink.
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.
It should be a legal requirement to have the options : Yes, No (and don’t ask again unless I go to options and explicitly change my mind).
There is a popup on OxygenOS (one of the reasons why I use LineageOS) Android whose options are “Agree” / “Exit”, with the implication that Exit just means they’ll ask you again tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, until you give in and Agree intentionally or accidentally.
I cannot help but draw a parallel in my mind between that behavior and rape.