I saw this exact same style of bot account years ago on Tumblr. They always follow the same naming scheme: one word or two words combined and then a string of 4 digits. I bet if you go to any of their profiles, you’ll find like 4 comments that are all copied from old threads and a bunch of upvotes on completely random subs, possibly even all of them being on other bot accounts’ posts and comments.
The real question is whether they’re being used to fake activity on Reddit, sway public opinion by posting this sort of political slant, or will they later be used to advertise scams and this is just to make them seem legitimate.
I saw this exact same style of bot account years ago on Tumblr. They always follow the same naming scheme: one word or two words combined and then a string of 4 digits. I bet if you go to any of their profiles, you’ll find like 4 comments that are all copied from old threads and a bunch of upvotes on completely random subs, possibly even all of them being on other bot accounts’ posts and comments.
The real question is whether they’re being used to fake activity on Reddit, sway public opinion by posting this sort of political slant, or will they later be used to advertise scams and this is just to make them seem legitimate.
Why not all of the above? If you have a service, you want to sell it to as many customers as possible.
Very good point.
I thought the names followed that format because that’s the format reddit used for suggestions when signing up.
I think the accounts are kind of “warmed up” this way to make them harder for reddit to identify as bots when they’re used for vote manipulation.
Like a bot that just voted in /r/politics threads world be easier to identify than one which comments here and there and gets a few upvotes itself.