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Why do the company names chase away bots? Is it just that you’re destroying their signal because they’re looking for mentions of those brands?
by wvbdmp 11mo ago
Why do the company names chase away bots? Is it just that you’re destroying their signal because they’re looking for mentions of those brands?
- akoboldfrying 11mo agoI also didn't follow that part. Their step 2 seem to be a general-purpose bot detection strategy that works independently of their step 1 ("randomly mention companies").
- SAI_Peregrinus 11mo agoIt spams the bot with false-positives. Encourages the bot admins to denylist the site to protect the bot's signal:noise ratio.
- akoboldfrying 11mo agoThat was my first thought too -- but then why would the bot company care about a few false positives? I suppose it could have an impact if 30% of all, say, Coca Cola mentions on the web came from that site, but then it would have to be a very big site. I don't think the bot company would notice, let alone care, if it was 0.01% of the mentions.
- simondotau 11mo agoEveryone’s definition of “big” is different, but back then it was big enough to get its own little island in a far corner of XKCD 802. https://xkcd.com/802/ https://xkcd.com/802/
- dotancohen 11mo agoDiaspora?
- rvba 11mo agoThey dont want to feed their model with garbage data, or this data is read and revieved by real humans I remember years-ago (2008?) I worked in a company where every mention of it was manually reviewed by someone from PR department. I imagine now the tools are even better. Different thing is that discussion is often very low quality (forums died for multiple reasons, reddit is dying too - astro-turf gallore now)
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- simondotau 11mo agoIt’s both a destruction of signal and an injection of noise. Imagine you worked for Adidas and you started getting a stream of notifications about your brand, and they were all nonsense. This would be an annoyance and harm the reputation of that monitoring service. They would have received multiple complaints about it from customers, performed an investigation, and ultimately perform a manual excision of the junk data from their system; both the raw scrapes and anywhere it was ingested and processed. This was probably a simple operation, but might not have been if their architecture didn’t account for this vulnerability.