[patcon]

But the machines were only built and deployed as a reaction to human energies? If there were no people participating as they were, then no one would have gone to the efforts to build and run the bots. I feel your comment seems to gloss over how important the human factor was to bringing the more "mechanical" part into existence :)

EDIT: speaking of which, I wonder if reddit could use some of the data from this to detect sockpuppet network on reddit... I imagine communities of a certain type might have engaged (or not) with this phenomenon in a very different way than others