This post will serve as the first update to the original post found here: Bots bots bots! Learn the signs and Report any you see!
I understand there was some scepticism about the presence of these bots when I posted about them initially and since then, I've conferred with mods from other subs as well as the team from r/BotBouncer and reached out to the admins on r/ModSupport (with no reply, as expected so far).
They've taken over other subreddits and others have noticed [#1] [#2] [#3].
This update is for our community and moderators and redditors from other subreddits who come in here wanting to learn more about what these bots look and sound like.
With that being said, the setup in r/travel is such that we seem to be able to catch most of them before they're visible by the public so you'll see that almost every new thread will show "1 comment" but nothing is there. That's the removed bot comment.
If you are interested in a deeper dive into this, I've compiled my findings over the last week on my Github wiki.
Key Features and Indicators
This is a joint effort with the help from a lot of people including u/grantwwu, u/Kananaskis_Country as always, u/cwcoleman from r/backpacking, u/bikemandan from r/AirBnB, u/Himekat from r/JapanTravelTips, u/Odie_Arbuckle and u/duffcalifornia from r/churning, the help I got on r/ModSupport, and of course our own r/travel moderators who have been on top of this within minutes of a new bot comment.
Why are you making these announcements?
Partly because it's important you, the community, understand how wide-spread this problem is and maybe it might get the attention of admins if enough people are aware and care about it.
Secondly, travel is a human experience. The fact that a bot is answering every single question as an Agentic AI for human problems and human experiences goes against everything I enjoyed and cared for in this subreddit. In a way, I feel like I have a personal vested interest in getting this news out there and having it solved and not just "hidden" by the BotBouncer/Hive-Protect apps.
Lastly, it's important for you to also know and think about how infiltrated the other subreddits must be if they aren't acknowledging nor handling this problem pro-actively.
Mods can only do so much to keep playing whack-a-mole with these bots.
How can you be sure it's a bot and you're not just calling a new user or someone you disagree with a bot?
I highly recommend you comb through this list of identified accounts and look through any remaining comments that are still visible. A lot of them have been removed because of BotBouncer. The probability that every single different account <1mo old, that has the exact answer OP is looking for as well as each of them consistently posting on the other 4 subs [JapanTravelTips, backpacking, AirBnb, traveladvice] is inorganic. As of now, the public won't see some of the other 4 subreddits on the bot's profile anymore because of BotBouncer removing them from all 4 of our affected subreddits.
Consider the last 100 threads created. One of the 100 different new-ish accounts will comment exactly once in each thread. Each of those accounts will also have commented in the at least 3 of the 4 other subs mentioned above. I know we have an audience cross-over with those 4 subs being travel-related but how is it possible that, without question, every single thread happens to have a different commenter that also participates in the same 4 subs?
Look through the comments I've snapshotted (with more and more target group comments in the screenshots for more context):
What other subreddits are affected?
From what I could tell, probably every single medium-to-large subreddit will have this bot presence. However, bots only operate within a target "group" of subreddits.
For example, r/travel is grouped with [JapanTravelTips, backpacking, AirBnb].
The bots that operate on r/awardtravel also operate on [CPA, SideProject, FinancialCareers, Watches, Big4, and HENRYFinance]. You can see a list of awardtravel bots here.
The bots that operate on r/churning also operate on [passive_income, Flipping, beermoneyglobal, FetchReward]. You can see a list of churning bots here.
I know there is also a ring of bots operating on r/pittsburgh but I haven't reached out or tried to check what "group" they are a part of.
Another mod has mentioned they are all over r/office and r/povertyfinance too.
I just checked out r/AppBusiness and r/AppDevelopers and it has the same bot problem.
So why now? Hasn't reddit always had bots?
Yes, there have always been bots amongst us in the comments but they were far fewer in frequency and consistency than what we are seeing now.
In my 13-14 years of modding this community, I've never encountered such a concentrated effort by bots before.
What can I do to help?
Did you write this with AI?
Absofruitly not.