1 week ago
6
Holy shit, I don't even know where to put this.
I'd never heard of a sub called theviralthings before like, yesterday. Now I'm seeing it on the front page every couple of hours.
I got curious and sorted the sub by its top posts ever. Literally all of them are bot accounts. I got bored after checking like 20 of them. They're usually 2-8 years old, one comments, then they just woke up a few months ago and started being active. Virtually none of them have a comment history older than 10 days. For some reason they're also so subbed to aita sub. All of them. I'm sure more posts will be human/organic soon, now that they've kind of forced their way into awareness.
I checked the mods, and at least 2 of the 3 are bots too. They constantly post random, generic comments like "wow so cute" and "I love this so much" all the time.
Something maybe even more strange though; I tried to start writing this comment in one of the threads on the sub, and it wouldn't allow me to type the name of the sub! Lol how tf is that possible? I just kept trying to type the "v" in the name and it would just leave a blank space over and over. I had to draft this in my email. I'm also pretty sure I was muted from the sub earlier today after I replied to someone that pointed out to me that the OP was an obvious bot. I had a somewhat controversial comment and 4 replies every time I refreshed, then it just suddenly stopped, and no more change in my comment karma. Clearly not an organic change over a few moments.
I know there's a ton of bots on Reddit, and many puppet accounts and whatever. But has anyone actually seen a whole sub forcefully generated in weeks, created by bots, modded by bots, and used by bots on this level? What's the point, to have unfeterred access to pumping up accounts to have credibly later? Is this about to become common here?
I'm no conspiracy theorist, but I'm trying to think of where to post this as I write it out. Lots of subs have rules against referring to Reddit in a submission, or meta posts or whenever. But the admins must be able to see this happening in the backend, right?
So weird and unsettling. I hate that it's so easy to influence people.
[link] [comments]
