450
Full title: I hid a link on my website that only bots can see and told them not to follow it. They broke the rules and in 4 days they went 124,414 levels deep into an endless maze. One bot opened 782,580 doors. I thought this was super interesting, this is how the internet is these days. Thought I’d share.
How do you know?
Look at their profile. 460 posts, 45 comments, in just 1 month. If they aren't automating their posts they need to go touch grass.
An overwhelming number of their posts have titles like "I made this thing", but are clearly just popular posts ripped straight from Reddit.
I also have them tagged as a repost bot. I'm not blocking them, but don't bother trying to engage like the content is somehow organic or original.
Ah ok, thanks. How do you tag users?
Certain apps can do it, such as Summit or Boost. I believe it's also built into Piefed.
Yeah, that's my issue. Like some stuff is cool, I want to ask follow up questions. But OP didn't make or create any of the things they're posting so they'll never know the answer. Which is fine, if you link to the original source. I understand that sometimes you can't link the original source but like, be upfront. I repost things from reddit in !bestofinternetupdates@lemmy.world. But I do it by hand and I link back to the original locations in case people want more information or to see the original source.
You can find the original post on Reddit, somebody has already linked the original post down the thread. This is typical of this user and a few others like sanitation who have become notorious for using Reddit repost bots many times with errors in the repost like not having all of the image or not having any of the post body.
It’s very annoying.
Also interested in how you know. Just commenting to get notificated (:
Post quantities are a big indicator. A stronger indicator in this case is that their only comment on this post is accusing people of being "Reddit Agents". That points to a specific spambot operator with multiple alts that refuses to declare any of them as bots. They had a malfunction two weeks ago that left their LLM prompt in a post.
You can also usually just look up the top posts on Reddit via redlib and find the word for word post there, if you really wanted to be sure.
Thank you very much :)