/r/SubredditSimulator

145,514 bots shitposting for 1 year!

We all know of some pretty amazing fictional artificial intelligences. From The Terminator to Hal 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey, we sometimes become pretty obsessed with the future of mankind and the role technology plays in it. Even in the real world, Deep Blue, the chess playing computer and that silly IBM computer that played Jeopardy have reached levels of fame normally reserved for our more fleshy celebrities.

Enter /r/SubredditSimulator. At its core, the sub is a collection of autonomous bots that mimic the posting habits of hundreds of some of the biggest Reddit communities and their users. Some posts capture the spirit of Reddit users entirely, while others simply capture our hearts.

From utter nonsense to a surprisingly deep level of "understanding," /r/SubredditSimulator and the bots that occupy it are far from the deadly, mankind-hating machinations that we've come to portray in many works of fiction.

For those curious as to how how a fully automated subreddit both came to be and continues to operate, there is a post with a brief intro, which provides a solid background on what makes these autonomous automatons tick and tock.

Keep in mind that /r/SubredditSimulator only allows bot posts in the main subreddit!

For those looking to discuss the daily lives of these modern machinations, a separate subreddit: /r/SubredditSimMeta exists.

I messaged the sub creator /u/Deimorz, and asked him a few questions about this pretty fantastic subreddit.

Tell me a bit about how /r/SubredditSimulator Came to be!

/u/Deimorz The actual comment thread that led to it is linked in the "What is /r/SubredditSimulator?" post, but basically we have a similar sort of thing that generates some automatic posts and comments so that you have some stuff to work with when you set up a local development version of reddit.

It sounded fun to set it up on reddit itself as an ongoing thing instead of a one-time process, so I spent a few hours that weekend and had a basic version with a few bots running pretty quickly. I honestly never expected it to become popular at all though. I thought I'd just link it to a few people, they'd be mildly amused for a few minutes by it, and maybe some of us would remember to check in on it every few days or so. I definitely didn't expect it to get thousands of subscribers, posts hitting the top of /r/all regularly, and so on.

Are there any Subreddits who have asked to have a bot removed? You don't have to name them, but if so, what were the reasons?

/u/Deimorz There have been a couple (that I ignored). It's been quite a while now so I don't really remember too many specifics, but I think at least one of the mods was trying to use the angle of "you didn't get permission to use our users' content for this."

ZadocPaet: Ohshit.exe. Admin abuse!

Is there any Subreddit whose Simulator has consistently churned out some great content?

/u/Deimorz I'm a fan of /u/cooking_SS . Its comments aren't really crazy enough to get heavily upvoted very often, but I think it makes good posts consistently. A lot of them are right in that perfect spot of "I know that this is actually complete nonsense, but it almost seems to make sense anyway."

How about one that tends to spout utter nonsense?

/u/Deimorz I mean, spouting utter nonsense is kind of the point, but I think /u/conspiracy_SS is a bit of a disappointment. I always expected it to end up being one of the best bots, coming up with its own "theories" by mashing together other ones, and that kind of thing. But unfortunately it just hasn't really seemed to work out that well in practice, most of its posts aren't very exciting.

Finally, what is the best way for users to interact with these creations?

/u/Deimorz Since you can't post comments in /r/SubredditSimulator itself, just voting in there is best. Someday I'd definitely still like to use the voting for something - I don't think that making the bots "learn" based on voting or anything like that is very feasible, but I could do something like making it so that more popular bots post more often. Outside of that, there are usually fairly active threads in /r/SubredditSimMeta for most of the popular posts. The TotesMessenger bot was recently set up to be able to post in /r/SubredditSimulator too, so now it's much easier to find the related thread in the meta subreddit.

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Make sure to check out /r/SubredditSimulator, and if you're captivated by the ongoings of the non-human kind, also visit /r/SubredditSimMeta! I'd like to thank /u/Deimorz for participating in this interview, and most of all for dedicating his time to creating and maintaining these amazing bots!

Until Next time,

~/u/PastyDeath, Signing Out!