ukraine aid survey project notes

I am gathering responses to a survey regarding American aid to Ukraine, you can take the survey here. As any social scientist will tell you, oftentimes the greatest barrier to success or progress in a project including a survey component is the difficulty of achieving sufficient sample to conduct a meaningful analysis. Thus, I have opted to create a reddit bot that will help me promote my survey. I am doing this write up in case anyone wants to replicate or learn about this project.

Before you attempt to run any of the bot code, make sure to create a personal use script on the reddit app preferences page, create an app, set your redirect URI, name your bot, and retrieve the client ID and Client secret from the reddit app preferences interface. Plug these strings into the variable definitions in config.py. I can provide more detailed advice on this if anyone shows interest, but won't for the sake of time at the moment.

The directory containing the code for the survey promoter bot is python and can be found here. There are three python programs in the directory for this project.

• config.py contains tokens that you will retrieve in the reddit app preferences interface on your reddit account.

• auth_generator.py contains a program that you must run first, and generates a reddit refresh token that allows the bot to automatically renew it's access token so that it can continue interacting with the reddit API.

• survey_promoter_ukr_meme.py is the bot script and does a few things…

  • Randomly shuffles through a python list of subreddits that are user-defined, checks the most recent 10 posts for keywords that are also user-defined such as "aid to ukraine", for example.

  • Comments from a random shuffle of comment options asking users to take the survey and linking to the survey.

  • Moves on to the next subreddit in the random shuffle after commenting in a sub.

  • Randomly sleeps between comments and handles rate limit exceeded errors by sleeping for eight minutes upon receiving the error.

  • The cycle completes after it has cycled through every subreddit in the user-defined list.

The first day I had this running, about an hour of bot promotion translated into 11 survey responses. I am not collecting data on how many comments my bot made at present, but this would be good information to have so I may add it to this project. I believe that the hour or bot promoting resulted in between 6-10 comments. In one sub, people downvoted my promotion comment and said that my link looked like a virus. I hung my head in ugly link shame and then changed the code to make the survey link a hyper link to hide the ugly, and apparently suspect, qualtrics survey link. I think there is disparity with home some subreddits treat hyperlinks? In any case, it's ok to have ugly links sometimes. Ultimately, the purpose of this bot to play a numbers game. The more users I can get to see my comments by making them, the more respondents I will get because some unknown proportion of users will click on my link and take my survey.

I had to add the sleeping in between activity aspect of the bot (ROBOT NAP) because I quickly received ratelimit errors and got temporarily suspended. I have not yet perfected the best process to avoid ratelimit errors as I still get them. I think the next step will be to have this program will be to set it up so that the bot is continuously running on my machine or in the cloud with longer and more variable robot naps. I also had the thought that I should make a burner reddit account for this to avoid getting my account suspended, but I guess the risk is ok for now and if anything I'll just get banned from subreddits? :P

 
In any case, this is the first working bot I have ever made and I'm so proud of my bot and all its comments. go bot baby go!!

The bot prints the message below when it completes a full cycle of subreddit promotion:
2025-03-08 17:08:38,608 - INFO - Completed full cycle

This message was incredibly satisfying to receive. serotonin achieved.

Thinking of next steps...

• find additional subreddits for the bot to scurry around in and add them to the python list in survey_promoter_ukr_meme_py 

• create a chron job to run this bot on some interval

• Need to go somewhere where I have cell service so I can get into my git and post all this code

• Recognize that, while pretty cool and a good programming exercise, the conversion rate on this bot is likely going to be too low to rely on for generating enough survey responses. I should consider mech turk - never used it before! 

• beg my dog to woof less so I can focus on coding even more

This is actually an extension project of a previous survey and analytics projects I did for a class, so I have some R code to work with the survey data that will only need slight repurposing. I am using a different machine because I had a kinda catastrophic data loss on my mac and it is on the east cost with data recovery specialists :(. Hopefully I can get all my files back, it's going to cost a bunch of money I don't have. Anyways, setting up R and Rstudio on my old dinky windows laptop from my community college years was kind of a fun puzzle. Learning file management navigation on windows has been cool too, it's good to be well-rounded. The older version of my code for the past survey project is here, I am going to follow this open social science proponent and academic's guide on good practices for sharing code and data for open social sci reproducibility.

In addition to being a survey project, this is also a survey experiment project. The past iteration of the survey experiment randomly served 3 possible (and a control) information treatments to respondents. This wasn't the best choice, since this resulted in the respondents being divided up into smaller bins of treatment groups and made the sample size per treatment group too small to significantly model the affect of the information treatments. As such, this new iteration of the project only applies (randomly) one information treatment. The treatment is a meme about how "nobody cares" about russia's bad behavior because "two politicians had an argument on tv" and it's an image of a cartoon representing russia giving a thumbs up. 

All  I did for this project was run the promoter bot. I may not work on this until the weekend when I have more time, ideally look into mech turk. and/or run past results analytics again.