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Another giveaway is accounts posting multi-sentence comments or reviews within seconds of their previous submissions. How can this get past bot checks is beyond

Another giveaway is accounts posting multi-sentence comments or reviews within seconds of their previous submissions. How can this get past bot checks is beyond me

kabes 5y ago
For the same reason that on facebook I still get daily friend requests from very sexy women with a brand new profile, 4 friends total, none in common, in a random location in the world with 1 post linking to some dating site. It's because they just don't care. Well, either that or facebook engineers are completely incompetent.
- bigiain 5y ago
  > Well, either that or facebook engineers are completely incompetent. Or they're making bank on dating site affiliate fees as a side hustle...
  - 3np 5y ago
    They don’t need to. The increased time you spend in the site as a consequence is enough of an upside to look the other way.
    - disgruntledphd2 5y ago
      This really isn't true. Remember that FB has many, many users and (presumably) many, many scammers, so one would expect to see lots of scams. I too get those (messages lately) friend requests, and almost always by the time I read the message the account has been deactivated (when it says FB user). So, overall, I think they're doing a reasonably good job on this particular problem.
      - kabes 5y ago
        My experience is different. I have many times reported a profile like this. Exactly as described above, a child can see it's a scam account. And then a couple of days later got message that after review the profile doesn't violate the community standards.
        disgruntledphd2 5y ago
        really? That's very odd (not that their reporting system sucks, it definitely does), but that you need to report it. Interesting that we have such different experiences, I wonder why that is. (remember that on FB, a 1 in a million event occurs approximately 3k times per day).
Scoundreller 5y ago
The social networks don't mind the bots if it leads to engagement. Their "anti-bot" policy is a joke. They know who the bots are. They only ban the ones that are anti-engagement (which they can also determine).
- shrikant 5y ago
  Absolutely this. Just a couple of days back, something had been bothering me about some new-ish commenters I'd encountered on Reddit, so I did an unscientific check. I realised that about a year or so back, Reddit quietly made it so that when you create an account, they autosuggest a username of the form "Word1-Word2-Number" or "Word1Word2Number", making it hard to tell apart from automated bot/astroturf accounts. (Try it out -- look at the profiles of any account you encounter that has the above form, and they've been created pretty much always on/after October 2020) My conspiracy theory is that this was a growth marketing hack to muddy the obvious differences between regular people accounts and bots/spammers.

Another giveaway is accounts posting multi-sentence comments or reviews within seconds of their previous submissions. How can this get past bot checks is beyond me

kabes 5y ago

For the same reason that on facebook I still get daily friend requests from very sexy women with a brand new profile, 4 friends total, none in common, in a random location in the world with 1 post linking to some dating site. It's because they just don't care. Well, either that or facebook engineers are completely incompetent.

bigiain 5y ago
> Well, either that or facebook engineers are completely incompetent. Or they're making bank on dating site affiliate fees as a side hustle...
- 3np 5y ago
  They don’t need to. The increased time you spend in the site as a consequence is enough of an upside to look the other way.
  - disgruntledphd2 5y ago
    This really isn't true. Remember that FB has many, many users and (presumably) many, many scammers, so one would expect to see lots of scams. I too get those (messages lately) friend requests, and almost always by the time I read the message the account has been deactivated (when it says FB user). So, overall, I think they're doing a reasonably good job on this particular problem.
    - kabes 5y ago
      My experience is different. I have many times reported a profile like this. Exactly as described above, a child can see it's a scam account. And then a couple of days later got message that after review the profile doesn't violate the community standards.
      - disgruntledphd2 5y ago
        really? That's very odd (not that their reporting system sucks, it definitely does), but that you need to report it. Interesting that we have such different experiences, I wonder why that is. (remember that on FB, a 1 in a million event occurs approximately 3k times per day).

Scoundreller 5y ago

The social networks don't mind the bots if it leads to engagement. Their "anti-bot" policy is a joke. They know who the bots are. They only ban the ones that are anti-engagement (which they can also determine).

shrikant 5y ago
Absolutely this. Just a couple of days back, something had been bothering me about some new-ish commenters I'd encountered on Reddit, so I did an unscientific check. I realised that about a year or so back, Reddit quietly made it so that when you create an account, they autosuggest a username of the form "Word1-Word2-Number" or "Word1Word2Number", making it hard to tell apart from automated bot/astroturf accounts. (Try it out -- look at the profiles of any account you encounter that has the above form, and they've been created pretty much always on/after October 2020) My conspiracy theory is that this was a growth marketing hack to muddy the obvious differences between regular people accounts and bots/spammers.