I'll remove the particulars to avoid anything partisan, but:

I failed to truly appreciate how cooked reddit was with bots until I accidentally clicked Popular and stumbled upon a national subreddit post with a 'chad meme', starring a particular political leader, whose unpopularity is hard to adequately convey to foreigners.

It was not just that this post had been so severely upvoted, but the comment section itself had a mantra more or less, with very little actual conversation, just echoing the same sentiment; and all those comments in turn upvoted to the point of drowning out the lone comments at the bottom (not downvoted, just not upvoted) expressing "???". I don't know if I'd ever even written the word 'astroturfing' before expressing my bafflement at a friend, so I don't think I'm very tinfoil hat about these things.

It was just utterly bizarre to see someone who can barely get a single win in public discourse being heralded -- monotonously -- like he was the second coming.

>I failed to truly appreciate how cooked reddit was with bots until I accidentally clicked

For me it was a wholesome response. It seemed genuinely kind/human.

Click on user profile...it's a bot just pumping out posts like that. Looked organic when seen in isolation, but when you see a wall of them you see that it's got to be an LLM (with a good prompt).

That was disheartening...I had kinda accepted that the sht-stirring rage posts might be bots but the kind comments too? Ouch

[dead]