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Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 22, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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In the last week I saw two instances of reddit comments that were unique in phrasing and almost identical. The first was in the same thread shilling some video game streamer, so that's not surprising, but the second was copying a comment from a three year old thread found via other discussions tab in /r/documentaries. Someone brought up a similar situation in a CW thread a few months ago but I don't remember it well. Anyways both comments were later deleted, and I only saved the second account name, a one year old account with only comments in the last week that just did the same^1 thing^2 today and most of its comments are copied from crossposts. Any guesses on the purpose of this?

Bots that copy old Reddit posts or old comments on the same submission have been around for years. There are ones that copy Youtube comments on a video into Reddit submissions of that video too, I remember a /r/videos thread where one of those attracted attention because the Youtube comment mentioned the current year and the Reddit comment copying it was in a different year. The goal is presumably to automatically create large numbers of spam accounts with a human-like history of upvoted comments to get past Reddit's anti-spam measures. The only new thing I'm seeing here is that it looks like they've worked in some program to rephrase the comment, maybe Reddit implemented some measure to detect the direct copies.

Garden variety karma farming? Generating pre-good standing and aged accounts for later sale?

Wait everyone is saying karma farming but why? There is no value to high karma accounts. Once you get above a low minimum threshold to post in a sub, there is no further value to more karma. It doesn't make one's content more discoverable.

There is value if you resell them. Some subs have high but hidden thresholds, especially for comment scores.

How much can you sell them for? What's the threshold? I feel like the threshold is low as is the resale value. It's pretty trivial to get big karma by just posting "orange man bad" level takes on a popular sub.

reposting old memes, reposting old links

It's so inefficient at increasing karma I had ruled out that possibility.

It is just karma farming by copying old comments. It's inefficient on a per-comment basis, but it can be automated and done on many accounts at the same time, so it works. It's a very common strategy that's been used by reddit bots for years. Another user noticed something similar a while ago.

I suspect the goal isn't to maximise karma, but generate a reasonable amount to make the account look as if it's owned by a real person.

Copying top comments is obvious and easy to see. Copying mid comments attracts less attention.

Posting only a handful of comments in the last week and taking so long to get to double digit karma is unbelievable too. Unless its behavior changes drastically I don't see how it can be worth selling or scalable as that would definitely attract notice.

I wouldn't be surprised if there are farming bots designed to look as human as possible, including posting at the average rate of a reasonable human. It may not be quite as fast, but it's easy enough to automate, and no reason you couldn't have a single bot run tens of thousands of accounts like this, so you might still get a reasonable number of decent karma accounts after a month or so.

Might be a more complex karma farming dynamic? Like most big subs require a minimum karma to post, so getting started might go that way?