I don’t browse reddit anymore but when searching for solutions to various problems, many times I end up on a reddit thread with the answers. I haven’t posted or commented since the exodus but I almost always have a red notification icon. And every time curiosity gets the better of me and I click it, it’s a reply to a comment I left years ago.
I usually mark it as read and ignore it but last night curiosity got the better of me and I looked at the user’s profile…lots of comments, all on ancient posts.
If they’re bots, I’m actually kind of impressed. They’d be good and relevant comments if they were posted when the thread was active. I searched for some of the unique replies and the only result was the comment in question so it’s not just copying replies. I just checked again while posting this and have a new reply - a question about a game tip I posted.
So is it someone farming 1 comment at a time or a sophisticated LLM? I’m leaning the latter but like I said… it’s an impressive one. If I didn’t know that reddit was full of bots, I wouldn’t have even questioned it.
Anyone else have the same “issue”?
Reddit is cutting off comments early and suggesting “threads like this”, most of which are multiple years old
Hahaha. “Don’t look at the rubbish we have now, have a look at this quality content we had before Spez sold the last bit of his soul.”
Interesting…this seems like the most likely reason. They DO seem like real people but I’ve been fooled before
Example:
Either they’re browsing reddit through a third party service that puts posts based on relevance without counting age, like scrollr. Or they are falling upon posts in google search results.
Huh, I never knew such a service existed. That would make some sense!
Nah, Reddit’s mobile webpage now cuts off comments past the first comment and replaces it with “threads like this” now with most of said threads being years old now
Example:
thats another option too!
I’ve got a few. And they are all comments on 5 year old posts (That I thought were deleted). A few of them are asking why I chose X product over Y so I assumed it was some kind of bot.
That definitely sounds like a bot. The ones I’ve been getting have mostly been about games I used to play…
The most obvious bot I got was “giving their opinion” on a change to a character that got a new ability with a patch…the character was redesigned at least once since I made the initial comment
We’ll never know because I deleted them all.
I’m getting replies to deleted posts so YMMV.
I get it but it’s still disheartening to hear. Reddit was a fantastic place for answers…sometimes the only solution to a problem is a comment from 2018
I have mostly disengaged from participating on Reddit, but I still pop in for hobby and special-interest subs, which have been slow to really build traction on Lemmy.
I only have one comment like that, but in checking the poster’s history, it just looks like they dived head-first into the fountain pen rabbit hole last year. I think in my case it might be a product of the Google deal and their promoting reddit in search queries by default. Pretty easy for a regular user to search “what fountain pen did the dr. cox actor have in Office space?” and forget to check the date before throwing a (likely correct) answer in there.
Saw one of those comments few months ago when going there, could be just a clueless user and lack of active mods to lock and monitor old threads
I had it happen on a six year old comment a couple weeks ago, of course they didn’t contribute to the topic of the post. I’m also going to assume they saw the post but the post age didn’t show up.
i sometimes get comments to sometimes even 6+ years old comments. it’s rare but happens and i always wonder how someone found my comment after this time.
Someone else commented the likely answer - the way reddit cuts off comments and suggests random “related” posts regardless of age. Then, of course, are the bots
i 99% of the time use old reddit so dunno about that. but usually if i get replys to old comments its actual users and not bots. sometimes i replied to them and asked and they said they found it random by looking through reddit and google as an example.
This doesnt sound specified like it but someone i know allegedly has been running bots in Reddit for targeted areas (ignoring post times) simply for the purpose of embedding specific things into future llms. Would not be surprised to find out other people are doing the same. Also can be usefull for historical revisionism, manufactured consent ministry of truth type shit.
