avatarMona Lazar

Summary

The article discusses the prevalence of bot accounts on Medium and provides tips for identifying them based on their behavior patterns.

Abstract

The Medium platform has been plagued by bot accounts that engage in inauthentic activities such as following thousands of users, leaving repetitive comments, and excessively highlighting and clapping for every story. The author of the article, who initially intended to avoid the topic, felt compelled to address the issue due to the impact on genuine writers and readers. They outline three key indicators of bot activity: following over a thousand people, leaving identical comments across multiple stories, and engaging with every article they come across by highlighting and clapping 50 times. The author emphasizes that these behaviors are not humanly possible and shares personal experience in attempting to replicate such engagement, which led to carpal tunnel syndrome. The article encourages readers to report suspicious accounts to help Medium maintain a genuine and fair community, and it concludes with a reflection on the nature of cheating and a call to action for building a better community.

Opinions

  • The author believes that the presence of bot accounts is a form of cheating that undermines the integrity of the Medium community.
  • They express that good, honest writers are often unaware of bot activities because they are focused on writing and reading, not on detecting fraudulent behavior.
  • The author suggests that anyone can identify bots by looking for patterns such as excessive following, generic comments, and uniform engagement across articles.
  • They reveal that some bot accounts have evolved to include varied comments and may even respond with human-like comments when addressed directly.
  • The author is critical of the idea that anyone could manually engage with content at the level that bot accounts do, highlighting the physical impossibility based on their own experience.
  • They have confidence that Medium will eventually address the issue of bot accounts but stresses the importance of community involvement in reporting these accounts.
  • The author takes a defiant stance against bots, asserting that they are too busy with authentic human interactions to be overly concerned with bot activities.
  • They remind readers that the actions of bots are not personal attacks but rather a reflection of some individuals' desire to exploit the system for their own gain.

The Many Bot Accounts Of Medium: Can You Tell Who’s Who?

3 ways to know for sure.

Photo by Kindel Media on Pexels

I was so going to stay out of this.

But I’m so weak and human that I just can’t! See where I’m going with this?

Weak and human, aka not strong and robotic? Hint-hint. I know you got it.

I’ve seen a lot of upset stories and comments lately about a certain bot on Medium.

And I’m going to sound so damn up-on-my-smart-horse when I say: how did you not know? It was blatantly obvious.

But I know how: because you are good people. Who doesn’t go robot hunting? Good people who don’t go around tricking, deceiving, and using others.

Because not in your wildest dreams would you have thought to use a bot to fake-read, fake-clap, and fake-highlight someone’s stories?

Because you’re not fake.

You’re real, honest writers who never imagined this is even a possibility. Morally or technologically. You were here to write and read, not do detective work.

How did I figure it out? Not because I’m smarter than you. I’m not.

But because when I started on Medium I did the detective work. I studied it a lot. The platform, the algorithm, the stories, the writers, and their accounts.

So I could see some patterns that anybody in my situation would have seen.

I’m going to detail them below and from this point onward there will be no doubt about who’s who.

This is what to look for to know that somebody either is a bot account or is a person using a bot:

1. They follow more than 1000 people.

This is not a clue in itself unless it ties in with the rest, so don’t go pitchforking everyone who follows a lot.

2. They leave the same comment on everybody’s story.

That’s a predefined text that the AI inputs into the comment section at a designated number of articles. Nobody is actually commenting, it’s as automated as the ATM asking you to input your passcode.

You have to be careful about this one, though. Lately, after people caught on that something is off, the bot accounts were programmed to vary their responses. Something the smarter ones do is to use AI only for the highlight and clap part and input real human come-out-of-a-brain comments if addressed.

3. They highlight and clap on EVERYBODY’S stories.

“Everybody’s” is relative, but if every story you want to highlight is also highlighted by the same person, you know that’s a bot. If they also clap on every article you see, you know that’s a bot.

Basically, if you see their name everywhere, always clapping 50 times, highlighting every line, commenting and engaging more than anyone else, mentioned in every thank-you-for-constantly-reading-me article, despite the fact that they follow a lot of people, THAT’S A BOT!

You know why? Because that’s humanly impossible.

You know how I know? Because I tried it.

I tried to read all the stories of the people I followed and highlight and clap 50 times for all of them. I’m a very fast reader and thought maybe, just maybe, I could pull it off. You know what I got? Carpal tunnel.

If you can’t do it at 1000 followees, you definitely can’t do it at 15.000. Or 31.000.

And yes, I just gave two clues about the following count of 2 bots.

I am never going to give real names. Please don’t ask me. Fellow writers did and they were right. But there are other bots out there. Just look for the clues.

Now that you know what to look for, they will be impossible to miss.

A few final thoughts:

  • People will cheat on you (because yes, I consider this cheating) whether they are using bots or not. That’s how some people are and you shouldn’t take it personally. It’s not something against you, it’s something for them. You’ve done nothing wrong.
  • I believe Medium will weed these fraudulent accounts out, but it might take a while and we need to report them. Just whining about the world being unfair will not make it fair. It’s our job to help build a better community.
  • This is for all you bots out there: I don’t care. Be a bot, don’t be a bot, I’m busy with my human writing, reading with my real eyes, clapping with my hand made of flesh and bones, and loving with my human heart. See how well you can do that last one.

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