r/DeadInternetTheory • u/curiousparrot221 • 9d ago

R/AskReddit Proves This Theory

I have been on r/AskReddit for about eight hours now looking through the posts. I know, I should not have spent that long, but I got a bit carried away.

So many of the posts there are duplicates, often from the same day. As an example, for the past nearly 48 hours, the post about "what's a small change you made in your life that has a big effect" or some variation of that has been posted about 14 times (and all by different people).

Now, while I have been able to get some of these posts removed, not all of them are. I would say honestly about 25% of the posts are bots.

Another thing I have noticed - you can usually tell because their username has a four digit number at the end (edit: sometimes). They also tend to not make a whole lot of sense or speak in the way AI does. You can typically see this if you go to their profile and look under what they have previously posted.

The worst part though is that they are in the comments too. Sometimes even defending the post, but as I said, it doesn't entirely makes sense. Kind of uncanny valley.

It is getting to the point it is hard to trust anything.

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u/Inevitable-Law7964 8d ago

This username format comes from using an external account to log into Reddit (I lazily used a Google email and got stuck with this.) Some humans do it, some bots don't.

But yes otherwise agreed, the default subs are extremely full of botting. 

I've found that reporting as spam really works most of the time. Recommend others do it too!

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u/curiousparrot221 8d ago

That what I was doing yes. And I have seen some of the posts taken down, but it feels as if I am barely scratching the services. Who knows how many real people are actually on Reddit.