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Figured out why the 'dead giveaway' bot tells people keep posting are wrong
Everyone points at the same things, like perfect grammar or a long reply, but after I looked at 200 comments flagged as bots in the r/BotOrNot thread from March, the actual tell was how fast the account replied to a post that was 14 hours old, because real people tend to show up when something's fresh or not at all, so what's the one thing you've seen that nobody else calls out?
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val_shah9h ago
I always used to think the reply speed thing was just about karma farming, like oh they're just fast typers, but reading your breakdown of that March thread made me go back and look at some old posts I saved and yeah the timing on dead threads is weird when you actually pay attention. What got me was accounts that reply within seconds to a comment that's like 10 hours old, when the post itself fell off the front page hours ago. No real person is sitting in a stale thread refreshing unless they're already in some kind of argument, and even then they'd be talking to specific people, not dropping random generic takes. The other one nobody brings up is reply order, bots almost always answer the top comment or the oldest one first even if it makes no sense to read it that way. Drives me nuts that people still just scream "bad grammar" when half the bots now write better than most of us.
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