ABSTRACT
How can bots (software robots) reflect a community’s culture and sense of play? What makes for a good bot citizen? This chapter considers the politics and culture of bots on Reddit.com (hereafter, Reddit). Reddit is an open-source social news and link-sharing platform where anyone can create communities of interest, called subreddits. The ability of community members (Redditors) to upvote content they feel is contributory or worthwhile makes Reddit a unique social media platform. Upvotes function as a way for a comment or posting to be made more visible to other Redditors. Likewise, Redditors can downvote, and thus make less visible, material they believe does not contribute positively or that they disagree with (although the latter is against the site’s informal rule system, which is called Reddiquette) (‘Reddiquette-reddit.com’, 2015). A system of points, called karma, indicates the relative number of upvotes minus downvotes (plus a fuzz factor to discourage manipulation), and suggests how worthwhile other Redditors consider a given posting or account’s contributions to the community (Salihefendic, 2010). Bots serve a multitude of functions on the site, and often reflect the community’s humour and relationship to geek/hacker culture. As both welcome and contested actors on the platform they have important ramifications for the site’s discourse.
