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by rybosworld 823 days ago
If you think any major social media site is not willfully ignoring some percentage of the bots, I've got a bridge to sell you.

And it's much easier to hide this problem on a site where the users are anonymous.

Reddit wouldn't be the first company to juice the numbers before an IPO. They've also admitted to taking advantage of fake accounts in the past: https://www.themarysue.com/reddit-fake-account-origins/
2 comments
zoeysmithe 823 days ago
I have a generic email address and its constantly being added to various new websites, apps, projects, etc. Its bizarre how blatant this is.

Its very cleary an IPO strategy is to hire "marketing companies" that are really botnet controllers to create users for your site to make it more attractive to investors. Then leadership gets to play dumb when these "marketing companies" are filling their user roster.

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rybosworld 823 days ago
Exactly.

Maintaining plausible deniability is all that's necessary to avoid the legal issues. Add very minimal bot detection just to claim you aren't doing nothing about the problem.

I've stopped using reddit for a lot of reasons. But a big one was that more and more of the content being posted was from fake users. I had an account for ~11/12 years and this was always an issue. But it seemed to really ramp up in 2023. I also started receiving direct messages from bots in 2023. That had never happened before.

This is an anecdotal experience. But there are quite a few users saying the same thing lately: there's a bot problem like there wasn't before.

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relativ575 823 days ago
> If you think any major social media site is not willfully ignoring some percentage of the bots, I've got a bridge to sell you.

Sell me. How do they usually do that? Any concrete example?

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throwaway14356 822 days ago
you can simply buy upvotes, stars, views, retweet's, reviews etc some will even guarantee delivery. If you buy 1000 and all of those bots get banned they will deploy 1000 new ones to deliver the order.

You prefer them to create real looking accounts or they start stealing them.

If it gets harder only affects the price.

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the_doctah 822 days ago
If a site has an API, it has bots. They call that common sense.
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