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Beautiful-Star t1_j2oqgop wrote

Hello: I am not technologically-minded but I would like to understand more about this. If someone could tell me based on this information, about what percentage of Reddit accounts are bots? I was considering buying Reddit Premium but I honestly think I may want to step away from the internet more than I have (I have no social media) if all Iā€™m doing is talking to bots.

Would someone mind filling an old woman in? I read the article and didnā€™t quite understand it all. I appreciate it.

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Programmdude t1_j2qkltt wrote

Bots also have a different meaning to just those that are fake accounts. On Reddit, it would also be the auto bot accounts that reply to people (like the auto mod stuff).

But by bot traffic, they'll also be including any server to server communication. This will be Google's Web crawling/caching bot. Or when a website asks another website (web service) for some information. It probably also includes when automatic backups are uploading data to Google drive or OneDrive.

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Beautiful-Star t1_j2rfg23 wrote

I never knew any of that. I was concerned about Reddit because I didnā€™t want to spend money on awards to give out if I was giving them out to bots.

Another poster helped me with looking at usernames for word/number combinations and Iā€™ve just learned to look through peopleā€™s post histories to find some basic signs of an automatic ā€œkarma-farming accountā€.

Youā€™ve helped me today and I thank you for it.

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GeorgeOlduvai t1_j2q8rj9 wrote

The overall percentage was roughly 40 in 2019. It's likely increased since then. Reddit specifically? Probably about that same 40%. Have a look at the usernames and you may see a pattern to a large number of them. Those are the likely bots.

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