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Comment by imnotreallynew | Hacker News Reader

Something that hasn’t been brought up in this thread is the massive problem Reddit has regarding large scale bot networks.

Reddit allows for unlimited account creation and has extremely poor, if any, detection algorithms. Additionally, its trivial to stream and analyze the entirety of Reddit comments and posts in real time (check out PRAW if you like Python).

Networks pushing COVID narratives and crypto frauds are probably the worst offenders. Here’s an example I just came across in /r/miami: https://reddit.com/r/Miami/comments/p1z6a7/have_you_guys_see.... The networks pushing certain COVID narratives are evening more troubling as, unlike crypto, im not sure what the end game is or who is controlling those networks.

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> Something that hasn’t been brought up in this thread is the massive problem Reddit has regarding large scale bot networks.

Well rest assured, Reddit administration does not see this as a problem at all. It's one of the ways marketing companies advertise on Reddit. There's a reason the moderators of /r/all subreddits tend to all moderate the same group of subreddits, and that they all often have super human posting frequencies. These are shared accounts for ad firms. This was discussed on HN before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23173018

I've come across crypto pumps on Reddit, but might not be on the right subs to have come across the network posts (or just haven't noticed yet). Do you have some links to those posts?

I wouldn't say this isn't a problem at all but the fact that subs have mods which have a lot of power seems to be very effective.

I don't spend that much time on reddit as a whole - but frequent about 5-7 subs every single day. These are mostly medium sized subs and none of them have a problem of spam. And I'm on them enough that it is by far the social media/news site I interact with the most.

> Reddit allows for unlimited account creation and has extremely poor, if any, detection algorithms.

Why don't they put some CAPTCHAs? They have no CAPTCHAs anywhere in account creation + post first time comment + first time thread + first time direct message?

Of course they do. That merely slows the rate at which you can create accounts.

> Additionally, its trivial to stream and analyze the entirety of Reddit comments and posts in real time (check out PRAW if you like Python).

Chunks of it. Don’t think praw and the api can do all live

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