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"You want a toe? I can get you a toe, believe me. There are ways, Dude. You don't wanna know about it, believe me." This has been going on basically since Twit

by dchuk 14y ago

"You want a toe? I can get you a toe, believe me. There are ways, Dude. You don't wanna know about it, believe me." This has been going on basically since Twitter was created, it's such an easy platform to game at every single level, from account creation to posting to gaining new followers. Look at all the users out there with ~500 follower differences between who they're following and who is following them...it's all automated.

dpeck 14y ago
Two things, first account creation is fairly difficult to game. Theres ways to do it, but it requires either quite a bit of manual interaction or some above average technical skills at this point, correct? Second, those users are the easiest to detect. A previous report the team put out identified high friend/follow ratios as a tip off, but any decent bot is going to work the follow-> hope for follow back -> unfollow if not churn to build up their numbers, look more legitimate, etc. Disclaimer: the post was written by a member of my team, and I've done some work on our social network monitoring previously and continue to.
- dchuk 14y ago
  as someone who has successfully built undetectable bots for a large number of sites, including twitter, I can assure you, it's not that difficult to game (so long as you have the right skillset, which I agree with what I think you're saying here in saying that not many have those skills). Even if only a handful of people have those skills, they can still do quite a bit in terms of spitting out massive amounts of real looking accounts. If a user can do it in a browser, it can be automated.
  - dpeck 14y ago
    Yeah, I think we're on the same page. After doing PoC for that sort of thing the number of easily detectable bots are a bit annoying that they don't put in the relatively trivial amount of effort to make them appear as a real user, but I guess if they're able to get some money in your pocket with that level of effort, more power to them.
    - dchuk 14y ago
      ha yeah, I definitely agree. It's amazing how the threshold for quality is with spammers/hackers/script kiddies...a little goes a long way with that kind of stuff

by dchuk 14y ago

dpeck 14y ago

Two things, first account creation is fairly difficult to game. Theres ways to do it, but it requires either quite a bit of manual interaction or some above average technical skills at this point, correct? Second, those users are the easiest to detect. A previous report the team put out identified high friend/follow ratios as a tip off, but any decent bot is going to work the follow-> hope for follow back -> unfollow if not churn to build up their numbers, look more legitimate, etc. Disclaimer: the post was written by a member of my team, and I've done some work on our social network monitoring previously and continue to.

dchuk 14y ago
as someone who has successfully built undetectable bots for a large number of sites, including twitter, I can assure you, it's not that difficult to game (so long as you have the right skillset, which I agree with what I think you're saying here in saying that not many have those skills). Even if only a handful of people have those skills, they can still do quite a bit in terms of spitting out massive amounts of real looking accounts. If a user can do it in a browser, it can be automated.
- dpeck 14y ago
  Yeah, I think we're on the same page. After doing PoC for that sort of thing the number of easily detectable bots are a bit annoying that they don't put in the relatively trivial amount of effort to make them appear as a real user, but I guess if they're able to get some money in your pocket with that level of effort, more power to them.
  - dchuk 14y ago
    ha yeah, I definitely agree. It's amazing how the threshold for quality is with spammers/hackers/script kiddies...a little goes a long way with that kind of stuff