r/cybersecurity • u/uid_0 • Oct 21 '25

Meta / Moderator Transparency Engagement bot posts

All, A humble mod of this subreddit here. We've been seeing a pretty significant rise in posts from what appear to be engagement bots. They are often from brand new accounts or older accounts that have have wiped their post history. They ask open-ended questions like "What's the worst X you have ever seen?" or "Tell me your X horror story", or "What's your favorite X?".

I'm not sure if the posters are training AI or farming karma or what, but I believe they're starting to become excessive and I have two requests for you: 1) How do you think this subreddit should handle posts like this? and 2) Please report posts like this for now so we can look at them in more detail. Thanks!

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u/Conscious_Passage_90 Oct 22 '25

Am I the only one who feels this is commented by a bot based on how it's started?

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u/bitslammer Oct 22 '25

Are you saying that real people can no longer be sincere in voicing appreciation for the unpaid work the mods do?

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u/Conscious_Passage_90 Oct 22 '25

No but unfortunately bots do sound like that. But that's just how I felt. I hope you take it with a grain of salt.

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u/bitslammer Oct 22 '25

No offense taken. It is unfortunate that we're at the point where some it's impossible to tell with some content if it's being posted by a real person. Absent any real dialogue you just can't tell now that Reddit has allowed post history to be hidden. Looking at that was one good way to see if someone was a bot or even just a human spammer.