A Marvellous & Incomplete Compendium of reddit Automatons & Bots

Workin’ on a Bot Farm

Bots also take resources to run - both to initially create & then to maintain the code - but mainly to provide a computer to run them on [6]. Bots need a computer to host their code and to lavish CPU cycles running them - reddit doesn’t do this, it’s up to the bots creator to host them somewhere. This generally isn’t free and can eat up quite a lot of computer resources, depending on what the bot does. Bots can get shut down by their creators for lack of resources - time or money - or lack of interest. Pretty much all reddit bots are just created for fun, for learning, or both - sometimes the creator just wants to move on to another project.

Bad Bots, Sad Bots

Some bots are designed to try to behave statistically more like human users [7], or to deliberately try to slip under the radar. Some bots are designed to boost the reddit karma [8] of their masters by pretending to be regular users and up-voting their masters posts and down-voting those who disagree with them. Some bots are designed to start flame wars and generally be mean, virtually.

This is pretty sad and pathetic…​ so I’m going to ignore them.

So, without further ado, here’s the compendium, split into Bots that you can Summon with an Incantation and Bots that just Show Up, without human intervention.

JiffyBot

Summon by posting a link to a YouTube video, then writing Jiffy! followed by a start time and end time, in either of these forms:

Jiffy! 0:07-0:12
/u/JiffyBot 0:00-0:15

The second form is apparently more reliable.

The bot will respond by replying to your comment, with a comment of it’s own, containing an imgur.com link to an animated GIF of that video, for the time period you specified. This is great for people on mobile devices - animated GIFs load much quicker than YouTube.

BitcoinTip

The bot scans user comments and messages for tips of the form:

+/u/bitcointip @RedditUsername $1
+/u/bitcointip @Username $1usd
+/u/bitcointip BitcoinAddress 1 millibit
+/u/bitcointip Username ฿0.001 verify
+/u/bitcointip $1 # This tips 1 usd to whoever posted the comments parent
+/u/bitcointip BitcoinAddress ALL # This sends your entire balance to that bitcoin address
+/u/bitcointip 2 internets # An "internet" is worth $0.25

You have to setup a bitcointip tip account in advance and put some funds into it. It then sends the specified amount of bitcoins from the sender’s bitcointip account, to the receiver’s bitcointip account. Supports lots of different currencies, which get converted to bitcoin automatically.

Allows you to tip people for useful or awesome comments, in a very natural and low friction way:

CHART_BOT

Making a submission to this subreddit will cause CHART_BOT to automatically generate and post a chart of your reddit posting history. You can also request charts of other reddit users by putting their username prefixed with an @ in the title of your submission. The charts look like this - here’s mine:

CHART_BOT also produces some graphs of activity which are quite interesting. Here are the ‘Posts Over Time’ ones for me (on the left) and chartbot (on the right). You can clearly see the characteristic posting pattern of humans (irregular) vs. bots (regular):

raddit-bot

Raddit-bot is a helpful bot that posts information when you post a link to a piece of media that’s been on radd.it. It’s posts look like this, sharing a wealth of links and information about things that people have linked to:

Discovered this bot while browsing /r/listentothis - which in turn led me to discover radd.it; I’m currently trying to resist getting distracted by radd.it itself.

haiku_robot

This seems to be quite popular, with lots of very highly upvoted comments - like this one:

Metric System Converting bot

MetricConversionBot will convert the following units to their metric equivalents:

and it leaves comments that look like this:

This bot is a (more popular) successor to the deceased SI_BOT. Interestingly, MetricConversionBot has attracted it’s own parody bots, MetricConversionNot - which randomly makes similar looking, but factually inaccurate parody comments (somewhat similar to the older, inactive parody bot Lord_Longbottom) and UselessConversionBot:

Website Mirror bot

Takes a (generally very tall) screenshot of the page that was linked to, puts it on imgur.com and posts a link in a comment:

tabledresser

It posts the first few rows in the actual AmA thread, with a link to the full table that it posts to /r/tabled. This provides a great way to quickly read a condensed summary of a complete AmA thread, like this one. They look something like this:

VideoLinkBot

VideoLinkBot scans for comments containing supported video links. When it finds one, it scans the discussion that comment belongs to for video links. It then posts the aggregate links it has found to a comment. If it’s already visited this discussion, it will update its existing comment with whatever new links it finds. Video links are sorted by the score of the comment they came from.

If the bot doesn’t see a certain number of links or all the links the bot sees were posted by the same user, the it won’t post a comment. Also, if a discussion has too few or too many comments, this bot will leave it alone.

This provides a useful summary of a wide ranging discussion, in a similar way to tabledresser does for AmA threads. The comments it leaves look like this:

meme_transcriber

This bot tends to turn up in subreddits like /r/AdviceAnimals/ and post comments that look like this:

YTScreenShotBot

This bot allows you to get a quick overview of the video, just by viewing an image - much quicker than watching the video, especially on mobile devices. This is what it’s comments look like:

and this is what the montage looks like:

JordanTheBrobot

This bots most user visible function is to detect when people have got the markdown syntax for links the wrong way round (a very common mistake), and if they don’t correct it themselves within a few minutes, leave a reply with the corrected links:

It also detects ‘spam/affiliate marketing’ links and leaves a reply warning people:

This bot also has moderator functionality, if you add it as a moderator of a subreddit, it will automatically:

It also upvotes the original commenter if it corrects you links and upvotes you if you thank it - which might help it’s popularity. It also has a real time dashboard which lets you see what it’s up to.

SerendipityBot & /r/Serendipity

I discovered this bot & subreddit combo while writing this article and it’s quickly become one of my favourites. /r/Serendipity is a meta-subreddit meant to broaden the perspective of its subscribers. It chooses a popular post from a completely random subreddit and posts it every few hours, so if you subscribe to it, you get a broad, random, serendipitous sprinkling of great content from across reddit on your front page – often surprising, wonderful things that you would otherwise never have come across. As the sidebar says:

NB: Occasionally, just by chance, a random post might be NSFW (Not Safe for Work) or NSFL (Not Safe for Life - i.e. ugh, wish I could un-see.), but not very often. I asked the bots creator, /u/umbrae, if it did any filtering - this is what he said:

Footnotes & References