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reddit bots diagram
Figure 1. How much does a software bot weigh, anyway? Heavily modified & adapted from the original public domain robot on openclipart, posted by johnny_automatic.

reddit, the insanely popular internet community, had 71,435,935 unique visitors last month, with over 2,360,783 people logged in [1].

I say people - but it turns out that not all the denizens of reddit are human. There are also bots. Lots and lots of bots. How many? No-one really knows. [2]

This is an interesting and somewhat shadowy facet of the otherwise very public reddit community, so I thought I’d take a closer look…​

What is a reddit bot?

A reddit bot is no different from any other user, as far as reddit is concerned. The only difference is that rather than a human logging in to upvote cat pictures and …

Continue reading “A Marvellous & Incomplete Compendium of reddit Automatons & Bots”