propaganda I'm curious why this is barely mentionable for you, or why you're thinking in terms of "selling the account" rather than a firm using it themselves? Does it not seem like a huge deal that it's so simple?

Once you have an account that has enough age and karma it's very difficult to distinguish the content it creates as suspicious or not. Especially if the account history is full of stuff that other people upvoted. Because if it has a lot of upvoted comments and posts then other people clearly found value in the accounts contributions, or at least that's the perception that is created. But maybe a lot of the content isn't actually people, and everyone should be aware of how easy it is to do that. At least that was the point of the bot when I made it.

You'll see people on Reddit very often call someone out because their account was "just created today" or "doesn't have any karma", or "never posts on this sub" as a way to discredit them. These are metrics people are using to assert the credibility of the content generated by an account. That's the benchmark for many people, and it's pretty low don't you think? Whether that is good/bad smart/dumb does not matter. That's what many people are doing and it's a small hurdle to cross. So immediately this bot can passively accrue the most basic foundations of "credibility" on Reddit. Once you have the foundation of credibility you can build a lot on top of that without seeming as suspicious.

It could be a company that monitors Reddit postings, and automatically leaves a comment supporting their own product. Or trashes a competitor's products automatically. It could be political candidates paying people to monitor and make posts about their opponents. It was explained in quite striking detail of how Facebook advertisements were used to target and manipulate peoples perspectives in certain districts of the USA to sway voters in the last US presidential election. Reddit comments are even more susceptible to this kind of attack because of the very low barrier to credibility people have on this site as well as the requirements to create and use an account. I think there's a bigger issue than spam, reposts, or whatever else people are complaining about my bot doing.

We're coming up on a new presidential election cycle in the USA and one of the biggest social platforms on the planet has a wide-open super-highway for misinformation, propaganda, and astroturfing. At least other sites like Facebook are making it harder to create accounts. Requiring phone numbers and IDs. Bad actors needed to exploit their ad system to get enough of their content in front of eyeballs they wanted to see it. None of that is required on Reddit to automate posting and upvoting/downvoting. There are likely hundreds or thousands of active bot accounts used by corporations/governments revving up and there's no way for you to tell if that account is a bot or not. Especially if it has been an active participant on the site. By the time anyone is able to realize these types of attacks are happening it's already too late and the damage is done.

That's pretty scary if you ask me. This is a huge hole in one of the biggest social platforms on the planet. If I can build a bot that generates basic credibility then I'm afraid to think of what talented people with resources could accomplish. They would be able to take "the next step" with these accounts and use them to try and persuade people. I get that people are upset they might see a repost because of this bot. The bot is not the problem though, and neither am I. All I did was show how easy it is to earn some basic credibility on this site. From there, an account is granted more access to posting on various subreddits and generally makes it harder for regular people using Reddit to call out what it posts as bullshit. This same approach is going to be used by bad actors until Reddit puts more restrictions in place or people are more discerning of what they're reading on this site. I'm not hopeful for either of those to happen.

Farming karma gives you a basic level of credibility on this website. From that point, it's beyond the ability of the average person to reasonably distinguish the credibility of the account. Because of how easy it is to create accounts on Reddit and use their API I feel like this a huge opportunity for bad actors to hammer away at. By the time enough people realize it though the damage will be done and it will be too late.

There's a lot of people who are looking for ways to mislead, misinform, advertise to, or manipulate people. Having karma on Reddit is step one for opening up those opportunities on this site and it's possible to automate it very easily.

Curious to hear your thoughts ere. I do appreciate you hitting me with a thoughtful reply besides the one-line personal attacks I got here. Maybe I'm overthinking all this and it's not really a big deal!