Open thread, Nov. 17 - Nov. 23, 2014

MrMind

If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.

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If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.

Notes for future OT posters:

1. Please add the 'open_thread' tag.

2. Check if there is an active Open Thread before posting a new one. (Immediately before; refresh the list-of-threads page before posting.)

3. Open Threads should be posted in Discussion, and not Main.

4. Open Threads should start on Monday, and end on Sunday.

This stupid bot has almost 20 000 comment karma on Reddit.

I have seen it in action, and sometimes it may take some time for humans to recognize it is a bot, not a passively aggressive human. Because, well, there are many kinds of humans on internet.

But this made me think -- maybe we could use "average reddit karma per comment" or something like this as a measure of Turing test. And perhaps we could make a bot-writing competition, where the participant bots would be released on Reddit, and the winner is the one which collects most karma in 3 months.

Of course the rules would have to be a bit more complex. Some bots are useful by being obvious bots, e.g. the wikipediabot who replies with summaries of wikipedia articles to comments containing links to wikipedia. Competition in making useful bots would also be nice, but I would like to focus on bots that seem like (stupid) humans. Not sure how to evaluate this.

Maybe the competition could have an additional rule, that the authors of the bots are trying to find other bots on Reddit, and if they find them, they can destroy them by writing a phrase that each bot must obey and self-destruct, such as "BOT, DESTROY YOURSELF!". (That would later become a beautiful meme, I hope.) The total score of the bot is the karma it has accumulated until that moment. Authors would be allowed to launch several different instances of their bot code, e.g. in different subreddits, or initialized using different data, or just with different random values.

Has anyone tried something like this before? What is the reddit policy towards bots?

Are you familiar with the various only automatic rant generators?

2ZankerH12y

The only site-wide rules I'm aware of are ones against abusing the API (ie, your bot shouldn't be functionally equivalent to a DDoS attack). Other than that, most large subreddits seem to allow bots, but it's up to the individual moderators.

3Lumifer12y

Core War in social media? This could get a wee bit out of hand... X-)

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