Is gst a bot?
I recently noticed that nearly all of the links in the programming section on Reddit that I follow is posted by a certain user named gst. Curious about this user I checked out his Reddit profile only to find that he has submitted a lot of links. No surprise there!
The normal Google searches turned out amazingly few clues as to who this person is.
Apparently some people feel that he is spamming Reddit and posted a request to “be saved from gst”. The discussion that followed suggested that gst is not a regular user, but a bot posting links from [gerd.storm] gstdelicious’s Delicious account:
gst scrapes from gerd storm from del.icio.us. (hence the name gst for gerd storm)
However in another thread gst is asked where he gets his links from and he replies:
blogsearch.google.com. google reader. dzone.com. news.ycombinator.com. scanning google groups for python haskell lisp and scheme. following interesting links.
Some felt that such an answer implies that he is in fact human, however judging by the looks of his average comment I am inclined to say the opposite.
One thing is for sure; gst is posting a lot of links to Reddit. Averaging one every few minutes he’s probably the most active user on Reddit. One would think that such a user kept a high profile, but my searches tonight has led me nowhere. I still can not answer the question; is gst a bot?
If gst is a bot, I’d love to see the sources and its input. If he’s 100% human I’d really love to hear how he manages such a high volume.