What profit incentive is there for bots that don’t interact? (There are edge cases, scrapers and such, but that’s a minute amount of traffic for large services)
Bots in this context are a tool for manipulating opinions and facts for political gain, marketing, personal benefit, or some other social or economic benefit.
They cost money to operate and maintain, and generally need a clear benefit to be used at scale.
That said, bots have only gotten complex in their language capabilities over the last couple years.
My point still stands regardless, use pre -LLM numbers if you want, it doesn’t necessarily change the picture all that much.
I would argue that most web traffic is bots. Scrapers are everywhere, all the time, constantly. The uptick of LLM search tools is bringing ever more of them online, too.
Whether that kind of web traffic has an account on Reddit, probably not. But Reddit bots surely could upvote/downvote/report to influence things rather than just posting?
Why would it be safe to assume non-content posting users would not be bots?
What profit incentive is there for bots that don’t interact? (There are edge cases, scrapers and such, but that’s a minute amount of traffic for large services)
Bots in this context are a tool for manipulating opinions and facts for political gain, marketing, personal benefit, or some other social or economic benefit.
They cost money to operate and maintain, and generally need a clear benefit to be used at scale.
That said, bots have only gotten complex in their language capabilities over the last couple years.
My point still stands regardless, use pre -LLM numbers if you want, it doesn’t necessarily change the picture all that much.
I would argue that most web traffic is bots. Scrapers are everywhere, all the time, constantly. The uptick of LLM search tools is bringing ever more of them online, too.
Whether that kind of web traffic has an account on Reddit, probably not. But Reddit bots surely could upvote/downvote/report to influence things rather than just posting?
Vote manipulation?
I always figured they trigger ad views, which financially benefit Reddit itself.