To potentially confirm your prejudices, I didn't get creepy PMs from bots but I did get NPCs trying to reply to my 2 year old posts so I deleted the account and it had several thousand something karma lol. What I did get was lots of creepy weirdos trying to start shit with me in the private chat because I posted anti-feminist rants people agreed with and they really, really didn't like that. I think this was back when reddit was still reasonably active though and had a fair mix of leftists and others and hadn't gone into full hive mind territory even though they were clearly setting up for it.

I would put the creepy weirdo e-stalkers in the category of NPCs rather than bots though they may as well be.

Edit: By the way in terms of whether reddit is using advanced tech or not, this is why I rant about machine learning algorithms, this technology has existed for awhile. It's just been utilised in a way to try and mimic human conversation with extremely varied results.

To potentially confirm your prejudices, I didn't get creepy PMs from bots but I did get NPCs trying to reply to my 2 year old posts so I deleted the account and it had several thousand something karma lol. What I did get was lots of creepy weirdos trying to start shit with me in the private chat because I posted anti-feminist rants people agreed with and they really, really didn't like that. I think this was back when reddit was still reasonably active though and had a fair mix of leftists and others and hadn't gone into full hive mind territory even though they were clearly setting up for it.

I would put the creepy weirdo e-stalkers in the category of NPCs rather than bots though they may as well be.