4 ms·

And why do social media platforms have such a hard time banning them?

• mattl 3y ago
  I’m not sure they do. I think some platforms are eager to onboard as many people as possible quickly. Those that aren’t so keen have very minimal spam.
• CableNinja 3y ago
  Its a constant game of cat and mouse with most things of this nature; ad blocking, spam/scam bots, etc. Admin finds a particular string of scams, adds it to their checker. Scammer gets blocked. Scammer changes wording, starts again. Rinse, repeat. Add to that, that many sites are not designed in ways that prevent signing up multiple times, and you get the ability to create botnets with ease. Also, spam accounts for -so much- traffic and posts, that companies would lose large portions of their userbase by just blasting every scam/spammer away in one go, which looks bad (in their eyes). Not-so-fun fun-fact: Spam email accounts for 45-51% of all email transit. While mail is pretty low byte count, simply killing all spam mail would leave places like google mail with half their infra unused, which again, might look bad in their eyes
• bediger4000 3y ago
  I always assumed that the "hard time" was fictional. That is, social media platforms could find and ditch bots easily, but there's some benefit (probably monetary) to the platform. I suppose the benefit could take the form of a bribe of the Right People. I've thought this ever since it was revealed that Uunet had a high dollar contract with Serdar Argic's humans. Later we found out Uunet had many pink contracts with spammers. I believe a lot of early ISPs has such contracts. This doesn't answer why, or how spammers and bot herders make money, though.