Botters

Janitor is currently dominated by creators who use software to generate millions of messages in a short period of time, boosting their bots to the top of trending every single day. Here's why you should care.

Disclaimer: I do not call out any suspected botters in this post. Do not leave a comment calling out a suspected botter. Your comment will be deleted and you will be blocked.

What is a botter? A botter is a Janitor creator who uses a special computer program to create hundreds of thousands of fake messages on one of their bots, creating the illusion that their bot is very popular. See this "51k" and "997k"?

That means that users have started around 50k chat sessions with this character, and between the AI's messages and the user's messages, around 1 million messages have been sent in total. When you see these numbers, you instantly assume that the character must be relatively popular. You assume that lots of other users are trying it and having fun with it, so you might figure that you should try it, too. Now, this is a screenshot of one of my bots, so I know all these numbers are genuine. But these days, many of the bots you see on weekly trending and 24-hour trending are not genuinely popular. They are botted with fake chats, to create the illusion of popularity. As a side note: the language does get confusing, as JanitorAI is a bot site with creators who make bots. In this post, I'm not referring to botmakers who make bots, I'm referring to botters who bot, botters who are also botmakers. (Yes, that sentence was confusing on purpose.)

Why do some creators bot? Faking popularity is a good way to gain actual popularity. It's a trick that's become more and more common on the internet these days. Get 100,000 AI bots to flood social media with fake posts about how amazing your rock band is, and suddenly your band gains tons of exposure and real fans who buy into the hype. Boost all your bots to the top of Janitor trending, and suddenly you gain tons of exposure that you never would have had before, and you gain tons of new fans who believe you are a great creator (because to many people, popular = good) Sometimes you can create a community around yourself. You can create a discord, get a community of people who glaze you and worship you. You can feel important. Sometimes, it's monetary gain. You can gain popularity, and then direct people to a site where they can pay to access extra images or extra bots.

How common is botting on Janitor? These days? Extremely common. From my observations, you can expect that 20-30% of the bots on the front page of weekly and 24-hour trending are botted. Many of these botters have tens of thousands of followers. Some of them have been doing it for years, too. It's really bad.

How is botting done? With a computer program. I don't know the specifics. But from what I've heard, you can pretty much open a program, fiddle with some settings, and then let it run all day and all night. It'll create a constant stream of messages for your bot, making your bot appear popular. You can create literally millions of fake chats and shoot to number 1 on weekly trending, then do it again a few days later.

So it must be some super fancy software, perhaps an advance neuro-network that automatically generates dozens of accounts, applies multi-layered VPN's, uses machine learning to perfectly mimic the chatting habits of real users, thus creating an undetectable and untraceable enigma that is almost impossible for JanitorAI devs to detect? No. It's a relatively basic software that can be easily detected by the Janitor devs. Devs could just look at the internal statistics of a botter's account and see dozens of clear indications that their characters are botted. Hell, a normal person with a pen and paper can easily find absolute proof that a creator is botting, so long as that person dedicates enough time to tracking the hour-to-hour, day-to-day message/chat counts of a suspected botter. Most of the time, it will be very obvious when something is wrong.

Why is botting bad? The better question might be "is there anything about botting that is good for the Janitor community? But in case you are one of those people who genuinely does not understand why botting could be an issue, here are the two obvious reasons: It's bad for genuine creators that want their bots to reach more people. The weekly and 24-hour trending pages are the main ways that users discover new bots. If you are a creator, and your bots do not show up high on the trending tab, your work will be seen by less people. Your genuine work is pushed down further and further the more botters there are.

It's bad for the users. Botters have to fake the popularity of their bots because their bots are boring. If their bots were actually interesting, they wouldn't need to fake their chat counts: users would just use their bots naturally. Now tell me, when you open JanitorAI to look for a character to roleplay with, do you want to see a selection of interesting and cool bots, or do you want to see a selection of boring and bland bots?

There are also several smaller issues that arise from the prevalence of botters, such as how it creates witch hunts and distrust in the community when so many creators bot, or how botters abuse LLM's and cause Janitor to bleed money. Botting is just bad for Janitor overall.

How do I tell if a creator is botting? There are two things you need to do. First, you need to find a suspicious pattern in the numbers. Perhaps the chat counts of a creator are consistently high despite having relatively few followers. Or maybe you see a bot has only been out for 1 hour, but it already has 10k messages (which is more than I've ever gotten in the first hour, as bots generally take at least a few hours to 'ramp up' in popularity). Or maybe you see the message count suddenly jump by 2k messages in a very short span of time. Now, being suspicious of a creator is not grounds for publicly accusing them of botting. To properly accuse someone, you need proof of foul play. And that typically involves tracking the stats of a bot more closely. So second, you need to establish a consistent pattern of clear foul play. You need to take screenshots or videos that show the anomalies of a boosted bot, and you need to prove that these anomalies have occurred many times across several of a suspected botter's characters.

That sounds like a lot of work! It is.

I'm just going to report any creator I'm sus of, and the mods will know if they are a botter or not, right? No. Your report will be reviewed... and then discarded.

But once I collect all the evidence, I can report the botter and they will be banned! Yay! No. Many botters have been publicly called out before, with accusers providing clear screenshots or videos that show without a doubt that botting occurred. 99% of the accused creators remain unpunished and unbanned.

But why don't mods try to get rid of botters? First of all, mods likely aren't the ones deciding if a botter gets banned or not. Mods follow guidelines and orders from the admins and devs. It's the admins and devs who have decided not to ban botters, not the mods. As for why Janitor doesn't want to stop botters: it's unknown. As far as I am aware, Janitor staff has never made a clear public statement about the issue. I could come up with some pretty solid theories about why Janitor doesn't take a strong stance against botters. But really, it doesn't matter why Janitor hasn't done anything. It only matters that they do something now.

What can Janitor do to take care of botters? They can ban botters. Take away their ability to be seen on trending. Revert the chat counts on boosted bots to 0. Create countermeasures to remove the ability to bot in the first place.

But what if the person accused of botting is innocent? Ok, let's talk about what happens when a creator is accused of botting. When a botter is credibly accused of botting, they will do anything in their power to deny and downplay the accusation. First, they will fully deny it. They will call the accuser jealous, mid, inferior, etc. "You are accusing me because you are jealous of my success!" Next, when suspiciously high chat counts and strange data anomalies are brought up, they will say that the reason their bots get so many chats is because their bots are just THAT good, so much better then everyone else's. "My bots have a 50:1 message to chat ratio because my audience just loves my stuff so much!" Finally, once conclusive evidence of botting is presented, they will shift the blame. "It wasn't me! Someone else was maliciously botting me! I'm being framed! They are trying to make me look guilty so I get banned!"

Well, what happens when a genuine creator actually is maliciously botted? Here's what a real creator will do: First of all, real creators will often notice the botting before anyone else does. Creators pay attention to their chat counts and numbers, especially when one of their bots become popular. As creators, we take pride in the knowledge that lots of people enjoy our content, and we savor every bit of those juicy numbers. If a real creator notices something fishy is happening, they likely won't stay silent. They will either make a ticket to talk to mods, take down their bot, or make an announcement post explaining what is happening. If a real creator doesn't know that they are being botted, but are suddenly accused of it, they will do everything in their power to find the truth. If they believe they are still innocent, they will at least try to provide all the data they can to try to prove that they aren't being botted. And if they agree that they are indeed likely being botted, they will be dejected, sad, and distressed.

If a creator is being accused of botting for a long period of time, such as over the course of several weeks, months, or years, there are two possibilities: They are being maliciously botted. Some malicious actor dedicated their life to fucking the creator over. The actor kept careful track of the creator, finding the exact time that the creator released each bot. The actor precisely turned on the botting software and boosted each bot in such a way that the creator could not detect it, but other people somehow could. The bad actor knew that the creator wouldn't get banned (because Janitor doesn't ban botters), but the actor counted on the fact that NicholasCS would one day make a post about botters and get Janitor to start banning botters.

or The creator botted their own stuff to get more popular.

You decide which one makes more sense.

How does the general Janitor community feel about botters? Overwhelming hate. But people are afraid to speak up about it, as there is strong potential for backlash. You will be punished for calling a creator out for botting, because Janitor will say you are causing a witch hunt. If you are a creator who accuses a botter of cheating: congratulations, you just made an enemy out of a person who has access to botting software that can easily be used maliciously.

Don't you fear the backlash? I don't really care. I have a platform, and I'm going to use my voice to raise awareness of a serious issue that is affecting this community. As far as I'm concerned, if some botter decides to mess with me, then the blame lies with the Janitor devs and admins for not taking steps to prevent this sort of thing from happening.

Final Statement The botting problem will only get worse and worse if something is not done about it. The community is clearly growing frustrated with the lack of action. Creators will continue to feel more and more alienated and uncared for. Users will notice the continuous decrease in bot quality and will begin searching for alternatives. If Janitor continues to allow botters to thrive, then eventually, botters is all they will have left.