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Sneaky spam in conversational replies to blog posts

shkspr.mobi

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Re: Sneaky spam in conversational replies to blog posts

#41

Post by radlad »

giraffe_lady wrote: post #40
pinkmuffinere wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Dishonesty, meet dishonesty. (Legally, I think libel requires intent.)

Re: Sneaky spam in conversational replies to blog posts

#42

Post by lightbulbish »

Ironically one reply to the blog post is.. spam

Jack Beagle @blog the ones in your screenshot are pretty good because they are a bit more conversational. I use myself because generally these types of spam messages will be trying to promote something specific but outside of the second message in your example it might have still snuck through. As the LLMs get better the spam messages will certainly get better.

Re: Sneaky spam in conversational replies to blog posts

#44

Post by radlad »

chorkpop wrote: post #38
jerf wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I assumed this was meant to make the bot postings less obvious to normal users, to buy them time to "solve the problem."

But definitely, bots on reddit seem significantly more common in the past year or two.

Re: Sneaky spam in conversational replies to blog posts

#45

Post by Barbing »

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…

Most elaborate scam (illegally run by SF entrepreneur?)

https://claimyr.com/government-services/irs/I-filed-my-2021-...

Re: Sneaky spam in conversational replies to blog posts

#46

Post by xyzal »

a2128 wrote: post #32
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 prox…

It did solve the spam/russian bot problem on https://www.lide.cz/ . You have to verify yourself using a national ID and you discuss under your citizen name. The conversation is since somehow way more thoughtful and civic than say on FB.

Not that I am happy with it, it would be ideal to have my old internet back.

Re: Sneaky spam in conversational replies to blog posts

#47

Post by SteveGerencser »

throwaway667555 wrote: post #5

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

This is a direct result of pretty much all of the LLMs using Reddit as a training tool. People are selling GEO services with reddit spam being a big part of that.

Re: Sneaky spam in conversational replies to blog posts

#49

Post by PaulHoule » 

   "Remember, there are no technological solutions to social problems."
is something I want to counterpoint with "there are no social solutions to technological problems", like how the looming situation pointed out by the Club of Rome in 1973

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth

would be difficult enough to solve in a socially cohesive society run by philosopher kings. Practically you have a choice between democracies which have a 0 probability of being adequate to the task (against the axioms of political science: it's like a perpetual motion machine which violates the first and second laws of thermodynamics and then the old professor chimes in and says it must violate the third too) and autocracies which might get lucky 10⁻¹² of the time; even if the tech fix [1] has a 10⁻³ chance of successfully kicking the can down the road I'd take that chance.

[1] say: liquid salt (not metal) fast breeder reactor with a supercritical CO2 powerset

Re: Sneaky spam in conversational replies to blog posts

#50

Post by PaulHoule »

I knew many link spammers circa 2008 and for a while people were excited by XRumer

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XRumer

which was a lot better than other products on the market and solved difficult problems like CAPTCHAs and email verification links and was famous for a "conversational" advertising campaign which generated results like

https://www.garagejournal.com/forum/threads/give-me-link-to-...

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