[terra_t]

I knew this purple-haired superheroine who did this to a certain "Zone" which is famous for vapid and incoherent blog postings written in broken English.

She made about 1000 fake accounts and used Tor to make them appear to come from multiple IP addresses. The fake accounts were made with a statistical model that generated plausible usernames, real names, profile pictures and everything -- it could even pair up the gender of the first name and of the picture... most of the time.

Once she wrote a blog post she'd just set the sequencer and her posting would hit the front page in about two hours. She found it was a very consistent way to get 5k page views, sometimes better if the blog posting was good and it got picked up on other social media sites like proggit.

She'd gotten a few of her blog posts to be "all time favorites" on this site, but then another project eclipsed her blogging and she lost the credentials for the fake accounts in a hard drive crash.

Today, this "Zone" is dominated by other people doing the same thing. If you know what to look for, there's a quite unmistakable signature.

She thought about doing the same for reddit, but it was clear at the start that reddit had much better defenses -- it would have been a bigger project, and she probably would have burned some of her proxies before getting it right.

Note that you can get around the IP address problem in several ways. One of them is that you can rent SOCKS5 proxies for $3/month/IP address. Supervillians use bot nets.

[jacquesm]

For every good thing that you could create on the internet there are going to be people hell bent on screwing it up.

Your 'friend' and her copycats think they are somehow entitled to that traffic, which in the long run is responsible for the famous eternal September feeling that many websites have.

Gaming the system is like the internet equivalent of slash-and-burn agriculture.

I don't care whether it works or not, or whether you consider it justified because her content was good I think it sucks.

If you want to have that traffic start your own social site, promote that and make it work, then feel what it is like to have people come out to game the system and use your knowledge of how such systems can be gamed to put a stop to it.

[terra_t]

It's hard to say.

The toughest problem people have starting community sites is getting the community. Dealing with problem behaviors is something you worry about after you've got the community. Just as casinos hire shills, many community site operators use Mechanical Turk or statistical models to get the ball rolling...

Who knows, we might soon have replicants that are more satisfying to interact with than ordinary humans.

[keefe]

It's the site owner's responsibility to figure this sort of things now. A set of users acting in a cluster is detectable as are aberrant behavior patterns from particular IPs.

[stcredzero]

I knew this purple-haired superheroine who did this to a certain "Zone"

Because of this, I was picturing Ramona Flowers performing the rest of the actions described in your comment.

[barrkel]

I believe those cheap SOCKS5 proxies are often actually implemented over bot nets.

[terra_t]

You can definitely buy them from people who host their own machines in data centers.

[barrkel]

I don't doubt that; but one should be suspicious of bulk proxy server lists sold for very low rates.