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Sneaky spam in conversational replies to blog posts

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Re: Sneaky spam in conversational replies to blog posts

#31

Post by chownie »

Aurornis wrote: post #10
throwaway667555 wrote: post #5

This also is absolutely rampant on reddit in the past months.

I’m not a heavy Reddit user but I’ve noticed a sharp increase in comment spam disguised as real discussion. I think the turning point was when they allowed accounts to hide their comment history. Before, when you could click on an account and read all of their other comments it was easy to tell when an account only existed for fake conversations about a product they were spamming. Now the spam accounts hide their com…

I have noticed the same uptick in bot-like behaviour there. The part I struggle to square is, why so much of it is so useless?

It's maybe account laundering, but on any popular post you'll see at least half of the comments are tangential at best. They're not an expression of anything a person would express, like replying with just skull emojis to a random news post, or saying "he really said" with an exact word to word recreation of a throwaway quote from a video. No one ever replies to these posts, they get like 2 upvotes (if that), the platform doesn't reward them at all but they constantly appear in a very artificial looking way.

Re: Sneaky spam in conversational replies to blog posts

#32

Post by a2128 »

xyzal wrote: post #26

Text generation is now cheap, so I expect this problem to worsen. I hate to write it, but I don't see any other solution on platforms, that aspire to be a modern agora, than identity verification ...

Why would identity verification solve this? The spammer can just verify himself, or if he doesn't want to or it's at a bigger scale than individual, then there will be services where you can get identity verifications on the cheap and they'll work either by paying people in a poor country to verify themselves all day, or, even more cheaply, sketchy age verification services on sketchy porn sites will be actually proxying or replaying people's verifications to another service of your choice

Re: Sneaky spam in conversational replies to blog posts

#33

Post by jerf »

lopis wrote: post #15
hrunt wrote: post #3

I subscribe to handful of investment-related YouTube channels. This pattern has been common for years. A bot will reply with a comment loosely related to the video and about how something worked for them. Another bot will reply asking how they did that. Another bot (not the original commenter) will reply that they worked with so-and-so or invested in such-and-such, and then there will be maybe four or five more comme…

It's been well know to happen on reddit too for many years. Whole posts and comment threads copied verbatim with new accounts. Nowadays with AI you can make it way more dynamic.

AI has been awful on Reddit.

I've acquired a sense for at least some of the bots. There's this set of bots that post a high-engagement post about once a day to an implausibly large range of subreddits, with implausible regularity. I can tell by the way I remove them and the way that the other subs are mostly not that most subs have not figured this out yet.

There is an obvious solution to that problem, which I haven't wanted to put out there, but I've become increasingly suspicious that it's already been figured out anyhow, which is to limit a specific user account to a specific "persona" with plausible interests and posting rates.

And that's where I think the race may well end, victory spammers. If there's a winning move against that in general I haven't figured it out.

I know reddit is concerned about this at the corporate level but I'm not sure they realize this is possibly their #1 threat, towering above all others. Not that I have any specific suggestions about what to do about it either. And it's years before the masses realize this and stop visiting, and by the time that happens all the social media companies are going to be in trouble for the same reason. You can see the leading edge here on HN but it's still only an almost negligible fraction of the total userbase of something like Reddit today. But that will change.

Re: Sneaky spam in conversational replies to blog posts

#34

Post by radlad »

bombcar wrote: post #18
basilikum wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be careful with that. Sounds like you could be mistaken for a bot that is part of the scheme and get your Google account banned. Then again, you should live under the assumption that your Google account could be banned at any time with no recourse. You do have local backups of all your Google account data and don't need your Gmail account to access anything important, right?

That makes me realize that banning is a punishment only usable on people who care about their account. Scammers don’t, a new bot account is a click away. But basilikum would be sad to lose his account.

For something like YouTube, there is a small monetary cost in order to verify a phone number.

Re: Sneaky spam in conversational replies to blog posts

#35

Post by sebakubisz »

hrunt wrote: post #3

I subscribe to handful of investment-related YouTube channels. This pattern has been common for years. A bot will reply with a comment loosely related to the video and about how something worked for them. Another bot will reply asking how they did that. Another bot (not the original commenter) will reply that they worked with so-and-so or invested in such-and-such, and then there will be maybe four or five more comme…

Have you seen the same chain pattern outside finance yet? Wonder whether investment scams are the most conspicuous because the payout per convert is high or whether it's seeded the widest on YouTube specifically.

Re: Sneaky spam in conversational replies to blog posts

#36

Post by nibbleyou »

sebakubisz wrote: post #35
hrunt wrote: post #3

I subscribe to handful of investment-related YouTube channels. This pattern has been common for years. A bot will reply with a comment loosely related to the video and about how something worked for them. Another bot will reply asking how they did that. Another bot (not the original commenter) will reply that they worked with so-and-so or invested in such-and-such, and then there will be maybe four or five more comme…

Have you seen the same chain pattern outside finance yet? Wonder whether investment scams are the most conspicuous because the payout per convert is high or whether it's seeded the widest on YouTube specifically.

I saw something like this for a book. It was under an Instagram reel where the person was describing ways to improve your self-esteem. In the comments section someone mentioned a book that worked for them and it had a few replies saying how it worked for them too. I searched for the book and it was a very new book from an unknown author and zero reviews everywhere.

Re: Sneaky spam in conversational replies to blog posts

#37

Post by zkmon »

Bots would win over all anti-spam, anti-slop measures. All blog posts and comments everywhere would be filled with spam and slop. That's when humanity turns it head away from screens, back towards other humans nearby and start talking to each other, while the ocean of slop and spam keep bubbling, infested bots.

Re: Sneaky spam in conversational replies to blog posts

#38

Post by chorkpop »

jerf wrote: post #33
lopis wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's been well know to happen on reddit too for many years. Whole posts and comment threads copied verbatim with new accounts. Nowadays with AI you can make it way more dynamic.

AI has been awful on Reddit. I've acquired a sense for at least some of the bots. There's this set of bots that post a high-engagement post about once a day to an implausibly large range of subreddits, with implausible regularity. I can tell by the way I remove them and the way that the other subs are mostly not that most subs have not figured this out yet. There is an obvious solution to that problem, which I haven'…

Considering reddit now allows you to hide your post history, I don't know if the admins consider bots to be the giant problem that they certainly are.

Re: Sneaky spam in conversational replies to blog posts

#39

Post by SV_BubbleTime »

hrunt wrote: post #3

I subscribe to handful of investment-related YouTube channels. This pattern has been common for years. A bot will reply with a comment loosely related to the video and about how something worked for them. Another bot will reply asking how they did that. Another bot (not the original commenter) will reply that they worked with so-and-so or invested in such-and-such, and then there will be maybe four or five more comme…

I’m putting together an AI presentation internally for my company, can anyone point to examples of this exact behavior? I’d like to use it as a reference.

Re: Sneaky spam in conversational replies to blog posts

#40

Post by giraffe_lady »

pinkmuffinere wrote: post #8
hrunt wrote: post #3

I subscribe to handful of investment-related YouTube channels. This pattern has been common for years. A bot will reply with a comment loosely related to the video and about how something worked for them. Another bot will reply asking how they did that. Another bot (not the original commenter) will reply that they worked with so-and-so or invested in such-and-such, and then there will be maybe four or five more comme…

Oh I love these comment threads! I like to add another reply saying something like “oh my goodness, I used Elizabeth Ferguson for my investing too!! She went to my college, so I thought I could trust her. But then I found out she was cheating on me with my wife! We got a divorce and i lost half my assets in the separation. Elizabeth Ferguson probably is enjoying them now :(. Just one experience, but buyer beware!”

Fun until that's a real person using a paid bot service to promote their business and you just libeled them in a perfectly preserved medium.
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