Comment by Rebelgecko
3 days ago
It's harder now that post history is hidden but I did something similar in the past.
Start with a single comment you think is a shill. Maybe 80% of their post history is vague inane generalities (like "aww so cute" in r/cats, or a reply to a top rated post that only paraphrases the existing context without adding anything new). You can use an LLM to identify every comment or post from that account that mentions a product or service. Take note of everyone who replies to that comment as well as the parent comment. Then use an LLM to identify every post from that original account asking for recommendations (hey r/bidet, what's your favorite bidet), and look at who responds. If you build this graph, draw directional edges based on who replied to who. The accounts with edges both ways across different posts are bots. Rinse and repeat by examing the post history of THOSE accounts. You will end up with a graph with a few loosely connected nodes (maybe false positives) but a tight web of spam accounts that frequently engage with each other.
That's your bot farm. This would be relatively trivial for reddit to implement, if they cared about reducing spam. I got a POC working in a few hours, back before they limited API access
It's a good idea. But this would no longer work now that Reddit hides post history, right? Or does the API still provide a user's post history?
You'd basically need to be pulling all the data for all the subreddits, and then recreate a user's partial post/comment history from that.
It's hidden for users who opt in (not all spambots do, believe it or not) but there are some 3rd party databases that index comments- no idea how complete they are
Ah, I thought it was opt-out and hidden by default now. (For new accounts, that is)