At the size of Reddit, it’s impossible as a mod to keep track of every account’s individual activities. A mod of a meme sub with millions of subscribers isn’t going to vet every user in the sub. To recognize a karma farming bot, you would have to know that their content is reposted. But if you’re viewing the bot’s post for the first time, how would you know? You would just assume that the post is original and upvote it. The karma bots also crop or filter their reposted images to make sure “repost identifier” bots don’t catch them.
You don’t need to vet every user in the sub. It is trivial to write a bot that detects whether or not things are reposts. There was literally a repostsleuth bot that did just that. All they would have had to do is pay attention to it.
I modded a sub of over 25 million subscribers and there wasn’t an unfiltered post that I didn’t go through. If you aren’t checked out as a mod, it’s pretty easy to spot the reposts after you mod the sub for awhile. It’s also fairly easy to spot a bot that needs investigating if you actually click on their profile.
The bots carried on for years doing little more than simply copying the previous post word for word and even if the image was hosted on reddit, they’d just repost the same link, they were trivially easy to catch and the mods of those subs couldn’t even put that little bit of effort in. Right up until the end of pushshift bots were reposting top posts from subs.
trying to dismiss their inability to act because bots have gotten more sophisticated doesn’t excuse them because they didn’t do anything when they were simple.
At the size of Reddit, it’s impossible as a mod to keep track of every account’s individual activities. A mod of a meme sub with millions of subscribers isn’t going to vet every user in the sub. To recognize a karma farming bot, you would have to know that their content is reposted. But if you’re viewing the bot’s post for the first time, how would you know? You would just assume that the post is original and upvote it. The karma bots also crop or filter their reposted images to make sure “repost identifier” bots don’t catch them.
You don’t need to vet every user in the sub. It is trivial to write a bot that detects whether or not things are reposts. There was literally a repostsleuth bot that did just that. All they would have had to do is pay attention to it.
I modded a sub of over 25 million subscribers and there wasn’t an unfiltered post that I didn’t go through. If you aren’t checked out as a mod, it’s pretty easy to spot the reposts after you mod the sub for awhile. It’s also fairly easy to spot a bot that needs investigating if you actually click on their profile.
The bots carried on for years doing little more than simply copying the previous post word for word and even if the image was hosted on reddit, they’d just repost the same link, they were trivially easy to catch and the mods of those subs couldn’t even put that little bit of effort in. Right up until the end of pushshift bots were reposting top posts from subs.
trying to dismiss their inability to act because bots have gotten more sophisticated doesn’t excuse them because they didn’t do anything when they were simple.