Bots

**Bots** (short for *Robots*, also abbreviated as 🤖) are defined as single-use accounts created by super-fans of an artist in order to inflate the average score of their favorite artists’ albums or related works on music rating and reviewing platforms. This behavior is called *botting*.

> "*[hidden]"* (the bots after being silenced by Rob).
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## Description

There are some profiles that join AOTY when the big albums by big popstars get released. Unfortunately they cause a lot of problems to the website, as they don't care for sharing their love of music and instead celebrating their love for their favourite artist and attacking other users for not enjoying it and/or giving low scores to albums that are loved by the community and/or albums made by popstars that don't have a positive relationship with said musician.
Bots usually have the following characteristics:

- They have a default profile picture.

- Their ratings usually consists solely of a particular artist’s works.

- The ratings are often perfect scores and, very often, zeros.

Rob has the duty to remove and treat the bots as they should be treated, because they can cause worrisome problems to a community that wants to talk about music in a (mostly) friendly way. To the ones who want to act like the bots, the community gently asks you not to do that.

## Notable cases

Some of the most popular historical bot invasions include the infamous bot invasion that coincided with the release of K-pop group BLACKPINKs **The Album**, which led to a coordinated attack led by fans of the group on twitter and a subsequent battle with existing site users.

This was followed by another attack by fans of BTS over the release of their ep **BE,** but there were also a handful of bot attacks from fans of other pop artists from across the world. Mostly coordinated on social media platforms like Discord and Twitter, their hostility results in the employment of spam control provisions on the site and has proven to be a problem directed towards the integrity of the sites userbase.

On November 16th 2022, bots targeted Louis Tomlinson’s sophomore album *Faith in the Future* and the album’s deluxe edition. The bots have since been removed.

In the early hours of November 4, 2023, over 1,000 bots joined the site and instantly spammed 100s on Jung Kook's 2023 album *GOLDEN*. The bots were somewhat active in the comments of the album, calling people who hated the album both 'antis' (stan term for people opposed to certain fandoms) and 'racists' (for hating on a Korean artist). The obvious trolling, such as fake reviews to get likes, came with this.

The bot attack was so bad that it launched *GOLDEN* from a 38 average user score to an 85 average user score in about an hour, got the album a must hear and caused a large retaliation from 'antis' and people who just hate bots. After a few hours, nearly 200 people rated the album a 0, tanking the score to a 79 and making it lose its must hear around 7AM.

## Bot Hives

Bot hives are artists that seem to get botted *by default* whenever they release a new project. Notable examples of bot hives are Taylor Swift, Ariana Grande, BTS, and all the One Direction solo projects (for more see List of Bot Hives). The term was coined by Baylen.