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Huh. The landline telephone business has, for a long time now, been compromised by spammers and bots (telemarketing calls and robocalls). I canceled my land l
by OliverJones 10y ago
Huh.
The landline telephone business has, for a long time now, been compromised by spammers and bots (telemarketing calls and robocalls). I canceled my land line about four years ago after going for three months without receiving a single call I wanted.
It seems the commercial social networks are headed for the same fate. And, they're headed for hardnosed and unpleasant regulation by governments. They probably need to clean up their acts.
- fokov 10y agoDoes anyone know if any of the social media sites have release info on their relative bot counts? I'm curious because I've seen the same posts in different places and now see a ton of comments boiling down to "Source?" again. The later used to be everywhere 8-9 years ago, but were typically people that actually wanted a source to read not just spam the question. Now it seems they are spamming it to distract from the real conversations.
- will_pseudonym 10y agoNo, because they report on growth of active users, which include bots. Their stock price would be reduced if they disclosed bot account numbers.
- highstep 10y agoThey also profit on bots through their ad networks.
- doctorshady 10y agoI get your analogy, but the great thing about landlines is you can selectively forward unwanted callers to anything you feel like. Social media websites don't tend to have anything like that.
- pjc50 10y agoI've never encountered this feature myself. While social media at least has "block" and "report". And the collaborative API-driven blocklists used against organised troll attacks. Even USENET has a better killfile than my landline.
- doctorshady 10y agoLook into call blocking, selective call forwarding.
- jgalt212 10y agoI get just as much if not more telemarketer/phishing on my cell as my landline. Just one data point, for sure, but is there any reason to think landlines are less secure than mobiles?
- ashark 10y agoMy cell phone's the same way now. Maybe one in ten calls, at best, isn't phone-spam. And that's with being on the Do Not Call list. I've been trying to figure out a way to do without an actual phone (except maybe a burner on the off chance I need to call 911) as a result. Text is by far the more valuable side of my phone plan, but mostly because everyone wants to use it for auth these days (I could switch to another messaging service for actual communication with people I know)
- noir_lord 10y agoI have important numbers set to come through, everyone else just rings out silently (and I disabled voicemail), either you are a contact and I'll ring back or I just delete the call notification.
- dhimes 10y agoIn the US isn't there a law expressly prohibiting these calls to cell phones?
- maxerickson 10y agoYes. But scammers don't care. It does actually work to ask to be put on the do not call list maintained by the caller (not the national registry), even for scammers. Nobody wants to waste resources.
- throwaway91111 10y agoYes, but a number of difficulties remain: 1) there's little way of figureing out who is actually contacting you. 2) If you file the number with the FCC you don't get a response. 3) it's not always obvious there's a commercial entity on the other side. I've gotten a number of calls that appear to try and keep me on the line while preventing from Turing test esque conversation from taking place. 4) some of the spam is legal--technically they aren't for profit, but they serve as a funnel for commercial services. These have been the most persistent with me.
- pfarnsworth 10y ago
- puranjay 10y agoTwitter is extremely forgiving with its account creation. An internet marketing buddy showed me how he could make 20+ accounts on the same IP address without Twitter throwing the ban hammer.
- brilliantcode 10y agothey probably want it so it looks good around their quarterly reports.
- fooey 10y agoBeing able to create loads of accounts doesn't really hurt anything. Leverage multiple accounts to spam and abuse signaling is what's harmful.
- andai 10y agoIs there a special way to do it, or do you just.. do it? My undestanding is that you are allowed 10 accounts.
- jonknee 10y agoAnd yet social media managers are a real business so they obviously don't care if you sign into hundreds or even thousands (even if it's API access, that would work for spam too).
- pilsetnieks 10y agoAn IP address alone isn't really that good of an indicator. With carrier grade NAT one address could be used by thousands of people.
- baby 10y ago> social networks are headed for the same fate On the contrary, Facebook is the last halo of peace for me. I only talk to my friends, never get unwarranted messages, spam, mail subscriptions, renewals, ads, scary calls/emails, ... you name it. Now if I could email via Facebook, that would be awesome.
- golergka 10y agoI already have most of work-related messaging on Facebook, and it's awesome indeed. Can't wait to drop Skype completely.
- Shivetya 10y agothey now spam cell phones as well with little to no fear of being stopped. worse is that many phone companies have no real desire to crack down on just offering up lines to these companies. if both provider and user were punished it could be handled
- ronnier 10y agoI receive a few calls a day from recruiters and spammers on my mobile phone. The spammers are usually around car warranties and home security systems. Long ago I've stopped answering calls from numbers that I don't know, but they still leave a voice mail. I recently picked up one of the calls and it was someone wanting information on my account because "someone opened a credit card in your name and we want to verify if it was you". I just hung up.
- CM30 10y agoThe internet's been heading for this fate for a while. Yes, the scale is a lot bigger now (30,000 fake accounts in a network rather than a few hundred), but similar things have been common on large forums and online communities since the late 90s or so. People have bought fake traffic, users and comments for that amount of time too. Often en mass with automated systems importing it from third parties like Yahoo Answers. It's just that the commercial social networks are now the main target, and the scale of these operations has gone up accordingly.