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Comment by proudeu | Hacker News Reader

Most of comments you read on reddit are written and/or upvoted by bots. No wonder they are trying to shift the narrative to be more pro-US. Eglin Military base was some time ago biggest source of traffic on Reddit. It’s up to you what you make of that

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>pro-US

*pro-illegal-spying

I am on the side of the US citizens, Snowden's side.

It's one of those rhetorical tricks being used to manipulate public opinion, where any criticism of the status quo is branded as "un-American" and "un-patriotic". But in fact it's the other way around, we criticize and are angry because we care about the country and the values it stands for.

The sleight of hand, the sneakiness of how everything gets turned upside-down is impressive though, how quickly a hero becomes a villain, and the villains openly continue with their villainy as if it were heroic.

And the villains are responsible for propping up your 401k and cheap electric bills. Almost enough intrigue to make you giggle.

It's super small subset of humanity that have both of those.

> Most of comments you read on reddit are written and/or upvoted by bots

I don't think that's true yet. At least regarding the portion of comments written; I have no idea about the votes.

There’s an important distinction here. Most of the comments you read. You being the general you. Most people will read a few dozen comments at most. These comments are overwhelmingly written by bots or inauthentic participants in subreddits like r politics. And they’re the most visible because these same groups also upvote them inauthentically

I just don't think that's the case yet, but we probably have no evidence one way or the other.

I don't know about /r/politics since I don't read it, but say in /r/worldnews, /r/europe, /r/ukrainewarvideoreport, /r/noncredibledefence, when I open a thread and pick ten comments at random and then take a look at their user histories I believe most are human.

I think /r/worldnews is 90% bots, judging by the repeating content and style of writing in comment section. And yes it looks like human would write.

>judging by the repeating content and style of writing in comment section

This is how reddit always has been.

Two things happen here:

1. bot farms buy stolen/sold accounts that have human comment history

2. bot farms re-post human content and then repost human comments on that content in a huge cycle to mimic the appearance of being human

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