Thread

1. nomel · 1790637663 · focus · HN ↗

   > Thin accounts: few comments, low scores, no real standing in the subreddit.

   > Young accounts, or accounts with histories that are hidden or wiped.

   Nope, this is no longer an indicator of a bot account. Many that I've looked into will have active posts to local town/region subreddits (often times multiple!) and different sports subreddits, sometimes getting unusually high amounts of karma in them (which suggests a network).

   Turing test is looong dead, so no reason to assume the small fractions of a cent to make comments, to get a reasonable history, isn't being taken advantage of.

   1. sippingabonedry · 1790640279 · focus · HN ↗

      Too many subreddits still have minimum karma or account age requirements. Most of those are ruled by tyrant moderators so you're not missing much, but it's made the site largely useless. I estimate 60% of discussions on Reddit are fake or fabricated on some level.

      Can't post honest questions anymore without posting obviously phony pandering banter first to increase your karma. What's worse, it promotes the bad behaviors the bots are actually good it.

      Bring back forums.

      1. intended · 1790657977 · focus · HN ↗

         It’s trivial to understand why the useless banter is needed though.

         Before people started using age limits on accounts, you had more bots and trolls on Reddit.

         Forums had similar barriers as well, with general or low stakes sections you needed to develop age or standing within before you could post on other topics.

         “Worse” isn’t a function of behaviors bots can do. There is no activity that dedication cannot make a bot cannot replicate.

         It used to be that you could make out patterns in bot behavior to figure out which accounts were authentic and which were not.

         With LLMs, those fingerprints are gone. They post in communities and behave in manners that are indistinguishable from normal users.

         Forums worked because they were in an era that has long since past.

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