Bots are becoming a growing issue in this subreddit. Yes, they are *going wild* and they are *fucking* over legitimate content.
At first, I noticed a trend where there was a sudden uptick in stories from the perspective of a trans woman. Turns out, that wasn't a trend, but a singular account posting long-ass stories on the daily. The storylines do not add up and have internal inconsistencies as well. So yeah, those ain't written by a human.
The worst offender though, is a whole network of bots. I have identified 15 accounts so far that post(ed) long stories daily, have similarly styled profiles and all connected via the same referal site to a collection of 4 OF accounts. The stories are again generated and show inconsistencies. I've already managed to get 9 out of 15 bots suspended. (and if the people running the bot farms are reading along: no, hiding your profile doesn't stop me from hunting you down. I'll get those remaining 6 eventually.)
And then there's the comment bots. Holy crap. If you see any GWS post with more than a dozen comments, you can bet the top comment will have numerous replies from fresh accounts with a badly spelled girly name and a profile bio that is the same slop over and over, as well as all the comments being the most obvious AI garbage just parroting whatever the top comment said. Surely, these are bots spun up to farm karma for the sake of subreddit rule 6. So all those comment bots that go without punishment will likely soon start posting the same sloppy stories. So yeah, without intervention, the subreddit is going downhill *fast*.
I've repeatedly tried to contact the subreddit mods about it, but haven't gotten any response thus far. They don't seem to be acting on the reports either. This is despite at least one of the mods showing public activity.
I have listed the bot accounts. I have suggested simply installing BotBouncer to take care of the problem without the mods having to spend any further effort. I have offered to join the mod team. I have filled in the official mod application form. Still, zero response to anything.
Consider this post an open letter to the mod team: please do a damn thing about the bot spam. I do not *want* the subreddit to be banned for being unmoderated and I do not *want* to use RedditRequest. But *something* needs to be done. Again, it could be as easy as installing BotBouncer and have that perform its magic.
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