So I ran Power Delete Suite as I periodically do. I have it configured to edit a comment and then delete it. It deletes comments that are older than 1 week old.

What was unusual was that within minutes I got the red envelope. And looking at it there was a response to a comment that I wrote 2 years ago.

So first thing is that as many were saying Reddit undeletes comments. I initially ignored that I saw some comments that I thought were deleted, but I assume it was because subreddits were locked and that’s why they were invisible to Power Delete Suite, but this was on r/programming which was unlocked for quite some time (not sure if it ever was locked).

Second thing is the response within minutes.

So my 2 year old comment still exists and it’s not showing up on my profile. I wouldn’t even know about it is not for that response.

Of course this could be a coincidence, the account that responded to me is 9 years old, the content of it seems normal, although I saw comments on r/ChatGPT.

Though the timing bugs me off. If the comment is not from a real person maybe when Reddit restored it the AI code thought it was a new comment and responded to it.

Another thing that contributes to my suspicion of chatbots being deployed is that I noticed since the API protest and after they unlocked subreddits is that I get more upvotes and more responses than I used to.

Anyone observed something similar?

  • thantik@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    Reddit started off with fake engagement in order to grow the site, so I wouldn’t be surprised in the slightest if more than half of the site was engagement bots running around. They likely have an entire suite of tools for such a thing.