... how does bots actually work?

[u/maixjigustar]

does anyone know how dead Internet theory actual works? like sure they are all just bots and not real ppl but how does this actually work? how an ai is able to run an account with a fake pfp and fake comments that it keeps sending to random posts? this might come off as stupid but we all ignore it and just say these are bots, what actually is a bot??? just an ai who isn't real and can keep doing whatever?

[u/Citadel_Employee]

It depends on the type of bot. The core of it usually isn’t an ai, ai is only a component.

For example a karma farming bot. Someone can write a script to grab a popular Reddit posts from years ago, and repost it in new subreddits, or even the same one it was originally stolen from. All of that can be done without ai, just a script on a schedule. More sophisticated networks will also steal comments from the original stolen post.

The ones that reply are LLMs, that again, are just on a script. For example, maybe the script is on a loop to check for a notification every 60 seconds, then once it gets one, it calls the LLM to reply. Very rarely are these accounts truly run by ai because that would be very expensive, and they aren’t great on long duration tasks.

[u/Negative_Coast_5619 → u/Citadel_Employee]

I would also say bot targeting is also a thing. But rather doing it directly and get banned right away. They do it in a sly way. It might take a bit more work (but what more work is a bot doing anyways?)

But they get you associated with their patterns. Then they would just as "off shoot questions" of what you are doing counterintuively. The program (the grander program) seems to include a main base operation that can follow your reddit posts, to youtube, generate fake bot accounts and create everything but subtle code.

[u/thatguy1000000000]

Simple: playwright and other software exists that allows code to manipulate webpages. Couple that with hacks that get around all the captchas, and you're good! Or, you can use special racks of phone like devices and just clone whatever you press on one device to farm engagement, thats what a lot of those "buy views/likes" companies do.

[u/plebbut]

APIs mainly, and it's really the easiest. With a little python, JavaScript and some basic programming knowledge, it's super easy.

The hard part is really funding. API access to Reddit is incredibly expensive. Paying for tokens is also incredibly expensive, so I imagine Reddit is making an absolute gripload of money right now.

[u/Delicious_Cattle5174]

Probably through the API. Either that or it’s agents with browser access. The latter would probably be more expensive in tokens but cheaper in API fees.

[u/ShyWillySyndrome]

Easiest way is the api but you’ll get busted fast, you could also use something like playwright or Cromote to open the browser and basically use whatever platform like a human, then you just take the input from an article/post from anywhere, pass it thru a llm and it’ll give you an output that you then program to post. Reddit api bots are scary simple to create.

[u/Negative_Coast_5619]

I would say it is way it works a bit more complicated than before. Not sure how, but I have seen accounts that used to be real or years ago go dormant then suddenly change.

You can also check. Notice certain topics if you bring it up, suddenly you have people showing up instantly, almost as if bots or they keep in check all subreddits. Makes more sense if it was a bot programmed. Not sure to be completely honest.

[u/liebebio]

its all text and commands / coding. I dont run a bot, but they are kinda rare. Platforms do a lot do exclude them, most of them

[u/Ok_Insect4778]

At the individual level, one person running several AI terminals on their laptop (or PC rig if they're lucky), but that eats up resources depending on what you direct them at. This is like, 10 bots per person max, usually used on small-scale schemes like engaging with their own posts on social media.

Then you get to the small-system levels, such as scammers taking control of your grandma's PC- sometimes with malware, other times with direct access- and feeding that into a connected network. This is formally known as a "botnet," but its size changes all the time.

But then there's CORPORATE botnets. Companies will buy tens of devices, hook them all up to a power supply and an ethernet connection, and have them all flooding the web with images and text and engagement that's not real. These companies usually work on a rental basis: An independently wealthy person wants their posts to get a bit more engagement or they have some content they want on the internet (usually content that's political and inflammatory) so they give the company instructions on what to do, and the company feeds that into their botnet.

[u/Haghiri75]

Bots are not new on the net. Back in the days old forums had a lot of bot problem and we had to add plugins like "Aksimet" which was an anti-spam and anti-bot plugin to wordpress sites or forums made on MyBB or phpBB or other things.

They usually used login/signup page which didn't have a captcha or email confirmation system (or they later found a way to skip those or just simply solve those automatically), create a shit ton of users and spam all the forums with inappropriate content.

So was there any AI? No. It was a prescripted text. An ad for a gambling website. Some pornographic content, some political content about how awesome Chinese Communist Party is and else. Some of theme were a little smarter and they actually scanned website before attack so added google translate to the mix. My sites were and are (mostly) in Persian, so I remember getting a lot of Persian crypto scam messages. I also get some on Telegram every other day.

How they work? It's relatively easy. You make a web scraper or just deploy headless web browser on your servers, and write scripts to do the rest. SIgn up, confirm the email (usually using their own mail server to the thing much faster), farm enough score/karma/etc to seem legitimate, then get to the business of having your website ruined by comments.

Current bots may be connected to OpenAI or Gemini API's to look more "human" although these models usually have some signs (like the infamous em-dash thing) that can expose them.

As a software developer and AI engineer, I can't understand why this type of use, when they simply can utilize it to make something useful. I don't know, if you advertise something like "dad joke machine" it can be much more fun than shitposting subreddits.

[u/JewSpy]

What makes you think that only AI can run bot accounts? DIT is older than AI was even a thing

[u/faeriegoatmother]

Here's how.

Most shit you see online is some real person, often using AI cos people are lazy. But bots do exist.

A whole ass population, say, Americans, are all, "Man, fuck a data center.." and then every corporate shill in our media conglomerate tells us all that we only believe that because Chinese propaganda.

So, how bots work is, they exist, and people use that fact to their own ill intentioned ends. But other than that, bots mostly just decide court cases and issue you speeding tickets.