One week ago, a bot my classmate made posted "Trump is a traitor and a piece of shit" on /r/politics and got 89 upvotes. This does not speak well on /r/politics...

submitted by happysmash27 from self.MeanwhileOnReddit

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[–]0eye 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (3 children)

I feel like your post could use some clarification.

What exactly makes this bad? I mean what is the actual difference between a human posting vs a bot written by a human?

Is the problem that it's getting upvoted? If so, are you suggesting it is being upvoted by bots as well?

I could see how comments being artificially upvoted being an issue but if the problem is not that it's being upvoted by bots, then what is the issue?

Additionally, who is to say this isn't happening here on SaidIt? It probably isn't due to the relatively small size of the site at this time but there is nothing stopping it, and it would be very hard to prove that it isn't.

[–]happysmash27[S] 4 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 0 fun5 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

The problem is that the discussion is often so simplistic that it can be emulated by a robot after only a couple of days of training! It means that the rhetoric is so ridiculously base-level, at least often, that a robot can do it... People sometimes call the userbase of /r/politics bot-like, and this, well, almost proves that...

Edit: To be honest, this is something I find more funny than serious, but my post ended up having a serious tone due to reading about the influx of what appears to be manipulation.

[–]hennaojisan 1 insightful - 3 fun1 insightful - 2 fun2 insightful - 3 fun -  (1 child)

/r/pol is the belly of the beast and my favorite trolling ground. :) Still there are a lot of Obama lovers over there and if you mention that Michelle is a tranny, they go totally apeshit. Ask your friend to put that on his bot.

[–]happysmash27[S] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

It was a neural network designed to get upvotes rather than an algorithm with set responses, so coding that into the bot would probably be pretty hard. Maybe the other bot designed to get downvotes could have that written to its history so it could learn from it, though.