A minimum amount of karma is required to start threads in many communities. I used to be subscribed to a community that didn’t have automated bot detection or a very active moderator and was being hit by bots posting ads to scam merchandise websites multiple times a day. Here’s what I observed.

These posts had a few dozen quick upvotes over the first few minutes of being posted along with a few comments from other bots shilling the ad after being posted. These shilling comments also received a bunch of initial upvotes as well, and then all slowly got a trickle of downvotes by real humans after. Real humans also commented to denounce the scam ads a few minutes later, some of which were also receiving a sudden spike of downvotes from bot accounts. The bots would eventually get reported and banned (only from the subreddit because Reddit themselves didn’t do crap about bots), and then this would repeat multiple times a day.

I’ve checked their post history and all of these bots were “dormant” and were farming karma by reposting content and copying comments in other subs and imitating human behaviour for the better part of a year before being activated and used to post ads.

This was only from a scammy merch selling website in a relatively small community and it employed a sophisticated network of thousands of rolling bot accounts, probably more than the number of subscribers the subreddit had. There are countless other bot operations on Reddit for advertising, scamming, astroturfing and propaganda purposes that might be even more sophisticated and difficult to detect.

I’ve also seen my own original content being reposted by a bot farming karma in another subreddit and I was shadow banned for complaining about it while the bot was allowed to do its thing where it went on using its karma to post propaganda.This is when I quit Reddit and never looked back at this cesspool of a site.

And all that was before AI text generation was viable. I don’t know if the majority of Reddit is bot accounts, but the number of bots on it is staggering.

Most subs does not allow you to post if your account is new or is below a certain amount of karma or both. So propagandists are gonna need farm karma in order to begin spreading propaganda.

Bots are used to influence opinions.

Think about it.

Wanna see a country go to civil war?

Make 2 sets of propaganda target towards 2 groups of people, make them hate each other.

Imagine you want to buy a (thing), and instead of going to a bunch of “10 best (thing) 202X” sites you do the sensible thing and head to the (thing) subreddit.

You get a super helpful comment on the (thing) they like and prefer. You’ve never heard of this company before but you decide to at least check them out. Bringing traffic to their site, browsing there selection and maybe even buying the (thing) you had no idea about otherwise

What if that comment wasn’t real, but a AI LLM powered bot? No it’s not your cheap run of the mill bot, but it could be well worth the effort if a company is willing to pay for it.

Propaganda. You use the bots to repost and recomment topics that cause division among the populace.