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Nah, take a look at the top comments in any of the default subreddits. They're either copy/pastes of the top comment from the last time the same meme was posted, or they're very clearly LLM-generated. Most of the big subs are absolutely loaded with bot activity these days.
There's a big difference between the default subs and the niche subs. There's bots all over the default subs, especially the news/politics ones. But like, the stardew valley memes sub, for example? I don't think there's a whole lot of russian bot activity going on there.
I went thru the profiles of 10 different users whose comments were on top of the most popular subreddits and none of them seemed like bot profiles. I'm quite confident in my original statement.
One of the most insideous and common bot karma farming techniques is to "replay" a historical post.
They'll look at a post and comments from like 8 years ago, and have one account make the post, and then have other bots copy the original top comments. Then have another set of bots post the original responses to those comments.
As a result, none of the bots look like bots... Because they're actually more accurately "ghosts" of other real human users.
So when people are talking about bots, it's not just LLMs. It's also accounts which "fill out" the space, but which are actually just airing re-runs.
The only thing I really miss about Reddit is subredditsimulator. At least then, you know for a fact that it's all bots, and is to be consulted sheerly for entertainment value.
So you did a reverse search of their comments? Because they take actual comments from real people the first time a post is created, and then they post that persons comment any time that post is created again. They wont seem like bots because theyre directly quoting actual conversations that real people had about a decade ago.
The copy/paste thing has been true for years even before the Reddit API exodus. Also bot-farms have been active for quite some time as well.