Mapping the Reddit Bot Ecosystem: Taxonomy and Evolution

2026-07-26

AI Summary

This study addresses the lack of systematic understanding of the collective structures and functional roles of automated bots in online communities. Focusing on 3,389 identified bots on Reddit, it proposes a novel classification framework that integrates content, behavioral, and infrastructural roles. By leveraging multidimensional features—including temporal patterns, community context, linguistic cues, and semantic signals—and combining clustering analysis with time-series modeling, the work constructs a bot “species” taxonomy. The analysis reveals 18 distinct bot types and uncovers key dynamics in their ecosystem: while the overall bot population peaked during the COVID-19 pandemic before declining, species diversity remained stable throughout the observation period.

Abstract

Automated agents increasingly participate in online communities, yet their population structure and roles remain poorly understood. Using a dataset of 3,389 identified bots and their full activity histories, we construct a taxonomy of bot "species" on the news aggregation and social media platform Reddit based on temporal, community, linguistic, and semantic features. Clustering analysis reveals 18 distinct bot types spanning content-specialized, behavior-driven, and infrastructural roles such as moderation and utility support. In addition, temporal analysis shows that bot numbers and activity expanded rapidly before peaking around the COVID-19 period, then started declining even before Reddit's 2023 API policy changes. However, the overall diversity of bot species has remained remarkably stable. These findings suggest that online bot populations form evolving digital ecosystems.

Problem

• bot ecosystem
• online communities
• bot taxonomy
• automated agents
• digital ecosystems

Innovation

• bot taxonomy
• digital ecosystem
• clustering analysis
• temporal dynamics
• online communities