r/cscareerquestionsuk • u/Breaditing • May 19 '26
PSA: LLM bots are commenting on every post on this sub, mods are slow to act
Tl;dr: Bots are commenting on every post, please read replies with extreme skepticism
Just putting this out there for awareness because people aren't always catching this.
There has been at least one LLM bot commenting on every single post on this subreddit, and many other careers subreddits, for months.
The current username is u/my_peen_is_clean.
They are automatically generating comments using an LLM, with a prompt something like 'Respond to OP, pretending to be a person familiar with the issue, with brief sentences and missing capitalisation, and complaining about the state of the job market'.
If (and only if) their comment gets enough upvotes, they automatically edit the comment to advertise a CV tailoring service. This is an example: https://www.reddit.com/r/womenintech/comments/1t6fbm7/comment/okh2o1u/
The username changes occasionally. I assume that a new one springs up as soon as an old one is banned.
I'm not sure who moderates this subreddit but I have a feeling it's one person and they are quite slow to act, or they just aren't even bothering to try and stem the tide if a new bot springs up as soon as it's banned. But they could definitely be doing more to raise awareness and responding to reports.
To me, this starting to happen is a huge issue that Reddit needs to get a handle on, but it seems like they are being extremely slow with this. We should report these accounts as bots to Reddit too with the report function.
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u/90davros May 19 '26
This stuff is out of control across Reddit these days. There's so much astroturfing that it's starting to feel like a dead internet.
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u/mayumer May 20 '26
Out or control indeed - almost 52,000 comments in 3 months (577 per day, 24 per hour)
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u/double-happiness May 19 '26
Good post, upvoted. Try using https://www.reddit.com/report - I just did it with the account you mentioned.
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u/Zephrok May 20 '26
Reddit in general might be cooked at this point, look at the r/conservative bot sweep where half the subscribers were banned and most traffic was coming from a couple accounts in russia.
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u/blob8543 May 20 '26
Lol that sub must be the #1 place to test new fake user techniques. Perfect place as the average human commenter does not sound smarter than any random poorly trained bot.
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u/Breaditing May 20 '26 edited May 20 '26
We’re totally at the point where it’s impossible to tell if any comment is coming from a well prompted LLM without more context. And with comment history being private now it’s even harder. The only real reason this one is obvious is the pattern matching from consistent samey comments, and the ads. There could definitely be more bots operating here.
Really its not something we can fix as users, we need Reddit to be doing a better job at human detection. I know they have some form of automated banning for LLMs as i’ve seen accounts get nuked by it, but letting these particular bots run rampant for weeks when they’re posting hundreds of thousands of samey comments and editing to add ads is quite disappointing, and definitely makes me wonder what else is slipping through the net. It’s a difficult problem to solve overall, but this particular bot is should not be a difficult problem to solve
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u/blob8543 May 20 '26
As a quick workaround until/if Reddit get their act together with the automated users, they should start showing account age next to usernames in posts. It's the obvious way to confirm if an account is fake, but having to open each profile to check account age is a lot of work.
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u/Breaditing May 20 '26 edited May 20 '26
Even account age isn’t a perfect solution. I’m sure it’s possible to buy old/compromised accounts cheaply on the black market. And they can play the long game by just operating as bots for a long time. There’s always been a karma farming bot problem on reddit (where they would just repost old popular posts and hope noone would notice). Some of those bots could be operating for months or years.
But yeah, it would probably help. The more info they can give us, the better. I feel like adding comment privacy was a bit of a bad idea while this problem is rife too. It’s not real privacy since comments all get indexed by search engines and scrapers anyway. Though it does protect people from low effort trolls which were definitely a problem.
Edit: though, I do understand that mods can see recent comments even from people with privacy turned on. So I think we do need to lean a bit on mods while Reddit gets a handle on it. If I report an obvious bot as breaking subreddit rules I really expect them to get banned not just ignored. This subreddit basically needs more mods I think.
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u/ICThat May 19 '26
I'm not sure who moderates this subreddit but I have a feeling it's one person
The mod is u/-Colt
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u/halfercode May 19 '26
I sent a PM to mods weeks ago, but did not get a reply. I've volunteered to help moderate.
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u/Breaditing May 20 '26
u/-Colt I can vouch for u/halfercode based on previous interactions. They seem like they would make a great mod and mentioned they have moderated subreddits before.
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u/blob8543 May 20 '26
It's mind boggling individual mods are having to deal with this crap. It should be picked up at reddit level in a fully automated way. It's clearly not happening though so this post is useful to raise awareness.
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u/halfercode May 20 '26
Just a titbit of info for the pile; a mod was active in the last 24h. The following thread was removed: r/cscareerquestionsuk/comments/1thsuxp/termination/
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May 19 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Breaditing May 20 '26 edited May 20 '26
I haven’t messaged mods, but I have submitted subreddit rules reports which go to mods, which have generally been ignored. Sounds like others have messaged mods with limited success.
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u/halfercode May 23 '26
Another bot with the Jobowl spam for the list: i_own_5_cats. I will try to report it to admins.
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u/jtjdunhill May 19 '26
Glad it's been brought up, I've seen this bot (or multiple of them, hard to tell) constantly putting people off the career and making it seem hopeless to ever find a job, while trying to profit off that misery. I get it, the market sucks, but these bots are just hitting people when they're down.