from Hacker News

Unauthorised AI Bots on Reddit Are Eroding Sociality

by adrianhon on 4/28/25, 1:59 PM with 44 comments

• by incomingpain on 4/28/25, 3:59 PM

  Reddit got big because they stood in favour of free speech against Digg's censorship.

  Would anyone dare even jokingly argue that reddit stands for free speech today? Reddit declined bigtime but something happened that Digg never had. Bots creating the illusion the site isnt dying. This has obviously created the 'dead internet theory'

  Reddit's 'sociality' has been gone for many years. I don't know who operates the bots but few months ago when i checked, the majority of people on reddit were bots.

  Then again it's no better on X or facebook. The bots have taken over for what goal? It's not immediately obvious to me. I dont even think its intending to keep reddit alive. Law enforcement and Government no doubt significant portion of the bots. Seeking speech criminals; which is fair. Ive seen many arrest videos of people who had made death threats on social media

• by nluken on 4/28/25, 2:54 PM

  This scandal should be a wake up call for anyone who reads or writes comment on the internet, including folks on this site. As good as the moderators here are, there's no avoiding the deluge of bots that have rapidly proliferated across the internet. Post history, while not a silver bullet, might be a decent way of spotting the bots for now, but in time that too will be harder to detect.

• by fullshark on 4/28/25, 2:49 PM

  Reddit sociality died a long time ago, once upon a time there was an actual community based on nonsense like love of bacon/narwhals. It's now just useful as a (heavily biased) crowdsource and for niche topics.

• by epgui on 4/28/25, 3:01 PM

  I suspect one day we will need human identifiers (eg.: like digital passports) to meaningfully participate on the internet.

  I'm not saying I like it or that I want it. But I'm not seeing how else to fix the problem.

• by parpfish on 4/28/25, 3:35 PM

  for the last few month i've been trying to figure out what sort of game people are playing with the ragebait stories on advicecolumn-esque subs (AITAH, AIO, etc).

  if you read one story in isolation, it seems fine. you'll think that it's a wild story (which is why it was worth sharing) that probably has a bit of dramatic license, but fine. but if you binge through the top posts, you'll start to notice all sorts of common tropes and patterns and they all seem fake and formulaic. the stories are highly effective and hooking people in, so much so that there's a whole genre of cross-platform slop posts where somebody screenshots reddit threads into facebook for driving engagement.

  but the posts dont feel bot/LLM-made, but it does feels a lot like some group of people are mixing-and-matching different scenarios to do... something. and i want to know what the something is.

  - is it purely an engagement farm (if so, what's the value in accruing non-transferrable reddit karma?)

  - is it some sociological experiment that's trying to understand the reddit psyche?

  - or is it that lots of different individuals genuinely just enjoy a creative writing challenge?

• by superkuh on 4/28/25, 2:43 PM

  LLMs are not the non-human entities that ruined reddit. Corporations are. And it all started with the huge venture capital infusions in 2014/15 and the obligations those generated. And frankly, these LLM bots they're complaining about are not off on their own. They are, again, a result of corporations. The worst and most dangerous non-human persons. They really need to be stripped of their legal personhood.