I think some of them are actually run by Reddit directly. They couldn't find any way to keep making 'line go up', so they decided they could sumulate growth by machine translating Indian users to English and vice versa.

I think they're translating between users transparently to make it look like it's not a ghost town, and the machine translation reads like bot text.

I could be wrong, it's just a guess.

You're probably right, as Reddit has or wants to go to the stock market and they need to demonstrate line going up, even if it's fake.

Because even fake / generated content gets impressions, comments, upvotes, etc, which is the kind of metrics they optimize for.

Reddit has been botting since the very beginning and never stopped.

This is true. I vouched it. It's well known that Reddit was initially seeded by bots copying from other sites to fake organic activity.

Because we built an economy where you’re rewarded for being an attention whore. Flooding the scene with bots is a good way to statistically make sure you’re a good little whore.

There’s more mass manipulation AKA nudge campaigns going on than ever. Plus, there’s a market for “aged” (forgot the term they actually used) accounts that look authentic.

Are you suggesting that people have bots answering question on place like AskReddit in an effort to nudge society in a certain direction? That would explain why much of Reddit, Instagram and Facebook is so completely unhinged, but that is just a wild way of influencing the world, and to what end?

Likely the classics: voting a certain way, supporting a certain state, supporting a certain cause, and buying things.

Yes, this isn't even a conspiracy theory. Reddit is one of the most astroturfed of them all, besides maybe Facebook. At least Facebook has consistent moderation they're (somewhat) accountable for. Moderation on Reddit is extremely shady and opaque, the subreddits aren't ran democratically so they can shut up whoever they want selectively to foster a particular sentiment.

This is another one of those "is your 'conspiracy theory' filter miscalibrated?" questions. It doesn't take much research at all to find many concrete, documented instances of this, organizations that do it, organizations that you can find that you can pay to do it, people posting their accounts of having worked at one of these companies, pictures of their setups, all kinds of things. If your filter is going "no, of course nobody does that, that's just a conspiracy theory", you need to recalibrate it because it is way off. Yes, people do it, at scale, and there's little reason to believe the stuff you can uncover in 5 minutes of searching is all of it either when there's every motivation for a lot of it to stay hidden. It's not a theory, it's an entire industry.

> and to what end?

Anarchism / destabilisation.

Well, they're doing an excellent job then.

>For something like customer service, I can understand why an AI would be deployed

I can't. And the only reason you can, is because we've been accustomed to rote script-based zero quality human customer service first.

AI customer service bots are awful. Their only redeeming feature is how bad most customer service processes already are.

There used to be so much discussion of "brand safety" and people would flip out if their ad showed on a video that didn't align with company viewpoints, even though the company clearly wasn't the creator of the video.

Now, companies are deploying bots on reddit that post stuff in the company's own name with zero human oversight!

It just frustrates me that all the things you learn either in IT (and I would assume also in business school!) go out the window every year. Who even cares about risk assessments and having legal review advertising claims and all that? Why even go to school to learn how to build systems, whether business/legal or IT/CS, if everyone at the top has decided it doesn't matter anymore?