9 ms·

Is Tumblr a bot fest?

131 points by ofca 15y ago

asfkrs 15y ago
Seeing the same as well. If I would have been conspiracy theory sort of guy I might have thought it as a strategy to gain confidence in beginning writers so they would create more and more content that eventually will make their blog substantial. Or it's just spam.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
- Rinum 15y ago
  But Tumblr has already made it
davidu 15y ago
I've not seen this on my tumblr...
- codejoust 15y ago
  I also have not seen this on my tumblr blog. I've only stumbled across one or two bot-like blogs.
  - mbesto 15y ago
    I get them ALL the time. At least 1-2 likes from bots per post.
    - dougaitken 15y ago
      it depends on what tags I use, iPad is a popular one obviously. Also, soemtimes I'll see a like of an ancient post with no rhyme to why. I'll agree though that a good percentage of likes / reblogs are spam / bots. They also often have ads on the blog so whoever is running it will get credit when you visit the blog to see who just liked / followed / reblogged you.
      - mbesto 15y ago
        #triathlon mostly as its just my blog for talking about triathlon related things.
- antr 15y ago
  One friend of mine runs a Tumblr on design, gets over 15,000 pageviews a month. He says that he gets 3 to 10 followers/likes who are spam a day. He blocks all of them to avoid linking his site to websites with plenty of ads or porn. It seems something is going on, it needs to be sorted out immediately.
codezero 15y ago
A lot of people that fit the profiles described are lurkers. Content consumers, but not creators. That's a pretty common thing on most social networks.
jonnyf 15y ago
Twitter is a botfest too - post anything with the phrase SEO in it and you get a bunch of followers with no icon, no tweets and no value. This is where Facebook has a big edge, the focus on real identity and the crack down on API use has kept Facebook much cleaner than the others
- dougaitken 15y ago
  Agree, FB really does have an edge on this but then again, what Twitter & Tumblr have above FB for me is the discovery of new content / new "friends".
- philthy 15y ago
  Disagree it still exists on Facebook very heavily. You probably just don't see it in your circle of friends. So yes Facebook has an edge in the sense they keep the hordes of dead accounts, spam bots, etc. away from you.
- gapanalysis 15y ago
  All you have to do is read the description of trending to see how people will try to game Twitter: "Twitter's Trending Topics algorithm identifies topics that are immediately popular, rather than topics that have been popular for a while or on a daily basis, to help people discover the "most breaking" news stories from across the world." If you want to up your followers, toss a profanity in every tweet. It's that simple.
- tomjen3 15y ago
  It is not just SEO. If you post anything with the word iPad or iphone you get a bunch of spam replies (like six or seven) all promising you will win a free ipad. It has gotten so bad that I had to resort to writing it in l33t speak.
- sabret00the 15y ago
  heh, Just tried mentioning SEO in a tweet, but even then I attracted two followers. Twitter seems to have the bot situation under control.
- _delirium 15y ago
tobylane 15y ago
(as I see it) Tumblr is/was kind of a clean 4chan, some memes/internet traditions, even some real world may get started there, or start in NY and get exposure there. Same with Twitter, same with anywhere you call good one year and bot infested a subsequent year.
brackin 15y ago
The author may not realise how big tumblr is with teens. It's huge, in my community far bigger than Twitter. Most use it to repost, like and consume. It's the same with Twitter, they got so big in the UK because of celebrities. A lot of people use it to follow celebrities and maybe sometimes tweet them or friends.
kodisha 15y ago
My stats - Member since 25/6/2009 - 7,500 posts - follow ~ 400 people - ~ 400 followers - post mostly photography / design / fashion - bots seen - < 5 [ same username there :) ]
- sgpl 15y ago
  Just for other's reference the tumblr mentioned is NSFW.
ortusdux 15y ago
Would it be outlandish for investors to request a one-time site-wide captcha?
- socialmediaking 15y ago
  Captchas won't really stop them, it just adds expense and time. Many black hat tools integrate captcha breaking services. Cost is somewhere around $2 per 1000.
momoro 15y ago
I think sites like quantcast, compete, google analytics etc tend to not include bot traffic b/c bots often don't evaluate javascript, and those tracking services often use toolbars/ajax requests that bots don't have. So, pointing to pageview graphs that track ajax requests / toolbars and assuming that it's mostly bots is likely to be a false assumption b/c bots are likely not included in those pageview sums.
- teaspoon 15y ago
  The "Like" and "Follow" buttons on Tumblr require JavaScript, probably to make CSRF harder. A bot that automatically likes posts would need to evaluate JS.
  - citricsquid 15y ago
    Liking a post on tumblr is just a POST request; it doesn't require Javascript. You can scrape the page (for the content id and authentication key) and submit the POST request to like the content without ever running Javascript.
sabret00the 15y ago
I've seen bots on Tumblr but far less than I've seen on the likes of Twitter. If you want to see a true botfest look no further than Tagged.
Meai 15y ago
I'd be more interested in knowing how Tumblr instantly knows just from my email address that I'm interested in following software developers. I didn't share that with them. I hardly use that gmail address for anything outside of google groups and github.
- naner 15y ago
  I hardly use that gmail address for anything outside of google groups and github. Tumblr probably has an "invite friends" feature where it offers to suck up your address book. Maybe a few software developers you corresponded with in the past used that feature.
  - Meai 15y ago
    edit: I didn't consider that they may have just randomly picked any category and getting "Developers" was random. It just surprised me, out of ~40 categories.
shortformblog 15y ago
From what I've heard (I know a couple of guys that work there), Tumblr is working on the spam and has made large amounts of progress. I made a couple posts about this earlier this week. My site has nearly 15k Tumblr followers, so as a result, I see some of this stuff more acutely than most people. http://shortformblog.tumblr.com/post/11645079360/tumblr-likespam-problem http://shortformblog.tumblr.com/post/11645079360/tumblr-like... (on a couple of methods I've been seeing a lot) http://shortformblog.tumblr.com/post/11654489531/tumblr-fake-profiles http://shortformblog.tumblr.com/post/11654489531/tumblr-fake... (on how the empty profiles have a payload) I think a big part of the problem is that there's an easy-to-exploit black-hat SEO technique that many like spammers have been using. (To put it simply: You can be guaranteed that the phrase "liked this" shows up on most Tumblr pages.) Since I implemented the technique I mentioned in the first post — which I admit isn't entirely desirable, because it also blocks some relevant content too — my Tumblr spam has gone down significantly. Also, note how, in that first post, I've gotten some spam notes in the past few days. It's because it contains the phrase "liked this" right in the post. I have the search analytics to prove it.
cing 15y ago
I have a small tumblr and I notice a lot of action from one particular spam bot, sometimes my posts are liked or reblogged like 60+ times by different accounts with sites that have the same template and advertisements. I've flagged them as spam through tumblr's built in system and it seems to have decreased.
socialmediaking 15y ago
Tumblr isn't a bot fest necessarily, but the fact is that any site with a large amount of traffic will generally become a target for bots. It's almost a compliment to a website, but at the same time it can be a nuisance. The Tumblr bots I'm familiar with follow by category and tags, not necessarily post content. The reason the author's blog gets autofollowed is likely because he is in a lucrative niche.
nickmolnar2 15y ago
We've been testing a new startup with a hacked together Tumblr, to simulate the app we're building. Because of this we've been monitoring our Tumblr traffic & interactions closer than most casual bloggers. We have 300 followers right now, and I'm going to about 15% of our Likes are SPAM. A problem, but not completely overrunning the system. They seem to also be using Tumblr tag pages to find articles to like. Articles tagged with common product keywords like handbags, shoes, or a brand name get much more SPAM Like activity than other posts. Tumblr does seem to be hiding the entries in the Dashboard for some of these, indicating that they have some sort of system in place for isolating spammers.

131 points by ofca 15y ago

Seeing the same as well. If I would have been conspiracy theory sort of guy I might have thought it as a strategy to gain confidence in beginning writers so they would create more and more content that eventually will make their blog substantial. Or it's just spam.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

Rinum 15y ago
But Tumblr has already made it

davidu 15y ago

I've not seen this on my tumblr...

codejoust 15y ago
I also have not seen this on my tumblr blog. I've only stumbled across one or two bot-like blogs.
- mbesto 15y ago
  I get them ALL the time. At least 1-2 likes from bots per post.
  - dougaitken 15y ago
    it depends on what tags I use, iPad is a popular one obviously. Also, soemtimes I'll see a like of an ancient post with no rhyme to why. I'll agree though that a good percentage of likes / reblogs are spam / bots. They also often have ads on the blog so whoever is running it will get credit when you visit the blog to see who just liked / followed / reblogged you.
    - mbesto 15y ago
      #triathlon mostly as its just my blog for talking about triathlon related things.
antr 15y ago
One friend of mine runs a Tumblr on design, gets over 15,000 pageviews a month. He says that he gets 3 to 10 followers/likes who are spam a day. He blocks all of them to avoid linking his site to websites with plenty of ads or porn. It seems something is going on, it needs to be sorted out immediately.

codezero 15y ago

A lot of people that fit the profiles described are lurkers. Content consumers, but not creators. That's a pretty common thing on most social networks.

jonnyf 15y ago

Twitter is a botfest too - post anything with the phrase SEO in it and you get a bunch of followers with no icon, no tweets and no value. This is where Facebook has a big edge, the focus on real identity and the crack down on API use has kept Facebook much cleaner than the others

dougaitken 15y ago
Agree, FB really does have an edge on this but then again, what Twitter & Tumblr have above FB for me is the discovery of new content / new "friends".
philthy 15y ago
Disagree it still exists on Facebook very heavily. You probably just don't see it in your circle of friends. So yes Facebook has an edge in the sense they keep the hordes of dead accounts, spam bots, etc. away from you.
gapanalysis 15y ago
All you have to do is read the description of trending to see how people will try to game Twitter: "Twitter's Trending Topics algorithm identifies topics that are immediately popular, rather than topics that have been popular for a while or on a daily basis, to help people discover the "most breaking" news stories from across the world." If you want to up your followers, toss a profanity in every tweet. It's that simple.
tomjen3 15y ago
It is not just SEO. If you post anything with the word iPad or iphone you get a bunch of spam replies (like six or seven) all promising you will win a free ipad. It has gotten so bad that I had to resort to writing it in l33t speak.
sabret00the 15y ago
heh, Just tried mentioning SEO in a tweet, but even then I attracted two followers. Twitter seems to have the bot situation under control.
_delirium 15y ago

tobylane 15y ago

(as I see it) Tumblr is/was kind of a clean 4chan, some memes/internet traditions, even some real world may get started there, or start in NY and get exposure there. Same with Twitter, same with anywhere you call good one year and bot infested a subsequent year.

brackin 15y ago

The author may not realise how big tumblr is with teens. It's huge, in my community far bigger than Twitter. Most use it to repost, like and consume. It's the same with Twitter, they got so big in the UK because of celebrities. A lot of people use it to follow celebrities and maybe sometimes tweet them or friends.

kodisha 15y ago

My stats - Member since 25/6/2009 - 7,500 posts - follow ~ 400 people - ~ 400 followers - post mostly photography / design / fashion - bots seen - < 5 [ same username there :) ]

sgpl 15y ago
Just for other's reference the tumblr mentioned is NSFW.

ortusdux 15y ago

Would it be outlandish for investors to request a one-time site-wide captcha?

socialmediaking 15y ago
Captchas won't really stop them, it just adds expense and time. Many black hat tools integrate captcha breaking services. Cost is somewhere around $2 per 1000.

momoro 15y ago

I think sites like quantcast, compete, google analytics etc tend to not include bot traffic b/c bots often don't evaluate javascript, and those tracking services often use toolbars/ajax requests that bots don't have. So, pointing to pageview graphs that track ajax requests / toolbars and assuming that it's mostly bots is likely to be a false assumption b/c bots are likely not included in those pageview sums.

teaspoon 15y ago
The "Like" and "Follow" buttons on Tumblr require JavaScript, probably to make CSRF harder. A bot that automatically likes posts would need to evaluate JS.
- citricsquid 15y ago
  Liking a post on tumblr is just a POST request; it doesn't require Javascript. You can scrape the page (for the content id and authentication key) and submit the POST request to like the content without ever running Javascript.

sabret00the 15y ago

I've seen bots on Tumblr but far less than I've seen on the likes of Twitter. If you want to see a true botfest look no further than Tagged.

Meai 15y ago

I'd be more interested in knowing how Tumblr instantly knows just from my email address that I'm interested in following software developers. I didn't share that with them. I hardly use that gmail address for anything outside of google groups and github.

naner 15y ago
I hardly use that gmail address for anything outside of google groups and github. Tumblr probably has an "invite friends" feature where it offers to suck up your address book. Maybe a few software developers you corresponded with in the past used that feature.
- Meai 15y ago
  edit: I didn't consider that they may have just randomly picked any category and getting "Developers" was random. It just surprised me, out of ~40 categories.

shortformblog 15y ago

From what I've heard (I know a couple of guys that work there), Tumblr is working on the spam and has made large amounts of progress. I made a couple posts about this earlier this week. My site has nearly 15k Tumblr followers, so as a result, I see some of this stuff more acutely than most people. http://shortformblog.tumblr.com/post/11645079360/tumblr-likespam-problem http://shortformblog.tumblr.com/post/11645079360/tumblr-like... (on a couple of methods I've been seeing a lot) http://shortformblog.tumblr.com/post/11654489531/tumblr-fake-profiles http://shortformblog.tumblr.com/post/11654489531/tumblr-fake... (on how the empty profiles have a payload) I think a big part of the problem is that there's an easy-to-exploit black-hat SEO technique that many like spammers have been using. (To put it simply: You can be guaranteed that the phrase "liked this" shows up on most Tumblr pages.) Since I implemented the technique I mentioned in the first post — which I admit isn't entirely desirable, because it also blocks some relevant content too — my Tumblr spam has gone down significantly. Also, note how, in that first post, I've gotten some spam notes in the past few days. It's because it contains the phrase "liked this" right in the post. I have the search analytics to prove it.

cing 15y ago

I have a small tumblr and I notice a lot of action from one particular spam bot, sometimes my posts are liked or reblogged like 60+ times by different accounts with sites that have the same template and advertisements. I've flagged them as spam through tumblr's built in system and it seems to have decreased.

socialmediaking 15y ago

Tumblr isn't a bot fest necessarily, but the fact is that any site with a large amount of traffic will generally become a target for bots. It's almost a compliment to a website, but at the same time it can be a nuisance. The Tumblr bots I'm familiar with follow by category and tags, not necessarily post content. The reason the author's blog gets autofollowed is likely because he is in a lucrative niche.

nickmolnar2 15y ago

We've been testing a new startup with a hacked together Tumblr, to simulate the app we're building. Because of this we've been monitoring our Tumblr traffic & interactions closer than most casual bloggers. We have 300 followers right now, and I'm going to about 15% of our Likes are SPAM. A problem, but not completely overrunning the system. They seem to also be using Tumblr tag pages to find articles to like. Articles tagged with common product keywords like handbags, shoes, or a brand name get much more SPAM Like activity than other posts. Tumblr does seem to be hiding the entries in the Dashboard for some of these, indicating that they have some sort of system in place for isolating spammers.