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Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement

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Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement

#151

Post by pixl97 »

gs17 wrote: post #134
hermitcrab wrote: post #118

So if I am running Facebook Ads and I get a load of fraudulent traffic, who is instructing these bots to make the fake clicks and why? Facebook? They have the motivation. They are getting paid per click. But I don't think they would dare. They would get sued into oblivion if they got caught. A competitor? They could be trying to burn up my marketing budget. But it seems it would require a bit more technical sophistic…

I'd presume it's not Facebook themselves, but they simply have no incentive to react to the problem as long as people keep buying their ads.

All social media seems to suffer from 'bot traffic is traffic and all traffic is good' mentality.

If stock regulators weren't so worthless they'd make them disclose fraudulent traffic percentages.

Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement

#152

Post by hermitcrab »

ryandrake wrote: post #141
hermitcrab wrote: post #118

So if I am running Facebook Ads and I get a load of fraudulent traffic, who is instructing these bots to make the fake clicks and why? Facebook? They have the motivation. They are getting paid per click. But I don't think they would dare. They would get sued into oblivion if they got caught. A competitor? They could be trying to burn up my marketing budget. But it seems it would require a bit more technical sophistic…

> But I don't think they would dare. I think the history of corporate bad behavior has demonstrated that any time you say "Surely, company X wouldn't dare to do [some profit-making thing]" you're probably wrong. This applies to all companies, not just Facebook. Revenue = R, Cost of the activity = A, Probability of being caught = P, Likely fine = F. If R > A + P x F, you do the thing.

Hopefully you would be talking about prison time for that sort of blatant fraud. But that might naive of me.

Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement

#153

Post by pixl97 »

hermitcrab wrote: post #143
c-linkage wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook could also pay a subsidiary to fraudulently click on the ads. While this might sound extreme and paranoid, this is exactly the kind of thing corporations do to transfer risk and create plausible deniability.

That would be straight up criminal fraud for which people could go to prison, isn't it (if they got caught)?

Possibly, but once things get separated by a few layers and parts of it occur overseas good luck tracking it all down.

Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement

#154

Post by stetrain »

malfist wrote: post #73
vmaurin wrote: post #69

I did work in the ad tech industry for almost 15y and big corp like Google/FB scam their user: - they don't allow double tracking, so you have to trust their numbers - if you look at IP from their "clicks", you see often a FB/Google datacenter IP range - and for most of the traffic they might send you, they did just clever algorithm and heavy profiling to stole your organic traffic. So they get this "amazing" perform…

Google ads are often like paying someone to stand in front of your business and hand out flyers to everyone going inside. Sure, a lot of your visitors were handed a flyer by google before they showed up in your store, but were any of them new customers?

And if you don't pay them, the spots in front of your store are instead filled by people handing out flyers about your competitor down the street.

They don't just take credit for people that were coming to your site anyway, they actively steer them away with competing ads if you aren't paying enough.

Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement

#155

Post by spongebobstoes »

hermitcrab wrote: post #118

So if I am running Facebook Ads and I get a load of fraudulent traffic, who is instructing these bots to make the fake clicks and why? Facebook? They have the motivation. They are getting paid per click. But I don't think they would dare. They would get sued into oblivion if they got caught. A competitor? They could be trying to burn up my marketing budget. But it seems it would require a bit more technical sophistic…

you can choose to pay Facebook per sale / "conversion" instead of per clicks, it makes all the incentives more clearly aligned

Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement

#156

Post by KaiserPro »

simul007 wrote: post #2

Hi HN. I run a marketing agency and fell down this rabbit hole after a client's analytics made no sense (50k visitors, 47 sales). I ended up building a simple script to track user behavior and analyzed 200+ small e-commerce sites. The average was 73% bot traffic that standard analytics counts as real. The bots are getting creepily good at mimicking engagement. I wrote up my findings, including some of the bizarre pat…

But what I'm struggling to understand is where is the money coming from to run those bots?

How does the advertising money get to them to make it worth their while to run bots at such a scale?

I mean sure, I suspect that people in the advertisers are doing it, but surely thats massively risky. there must be a grey market for this kind of transaction?

Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement

#157

Post by pixl97 »

hermitcrab wrote: post #149

I recently ran $851 of ads on Reddit and the results were crap. Mean engaged time per active user of 8 seconds (mean - not median!). I makes me wonder if it wasn't mostly bots. If so, who was running the bots? https://successfulsoftware.net/2025/08/11/what-i-learned-spe...

I mean it could just be people scraping everything, and as reddit has made that more difficult the scrapers may look more realistic.

That or dark patters that get people to click on ads in the middle of content, where the user instantly backs out once they realize.

Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement

#158

Post by zeroonetwothree »

hermitcrab wrote: post #149

I recently ran $851 of ads on Reddit and the results were crap. Mean engaged time per active user of 8 seconds (mean - not median!). I makes me wonder if it wasn't mostly bots. If so, who was running the bots? https://successfulsoftware.net/2025/08/11/what-i-learned-spe...

Reddit seems to have one of the biggest bot problems of any social media.

Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement

#159

Post by burnte »

KaiserPro wrote: post #156
simul007 wrote: post #2

Hi HN. I run a marketing agency and fell down this rabbit hole after a client's analytics made no sense (50k visitors, 47 sales). I ended up building a simple script to track user behavior and analyzed 200+ small e-commerce sites. The average was 73% bot traffic that standard analytics counts as real. The bots are getting creepily good at mimicking engagement. I wrote up my findings, including some of the bizarre pat…

But what I'm struggling to understand is where is the money coming from to run those bots? How does the advertising money get to them to make it worth their while to run bots at such a scale? I mean sure, I suspect that people in the advertisers are doing it, but surely thats massively risky. there must be a grey market for this kind of transaction?

> But what I'm struggling to understand is where is the money coming from to run those bots?

I agree, I have a hard time understanding the motivation for this behavior. It's obviously happening, I just don't know how someone benefits from a bot pretending to browse the internet.

Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement

#160

Post by pixl97 »

fukka42 wrote: post #78
baobun wrote: post #15

Would like to see the script. From reading it's impossible to tell if the methodology is sound. Would legitimate users with adblockers or disabling JS get counted is false positives, for example? That said, 73% doesn't come as a surprise. If anything I expect it to be higher. I guess this quote sums up the situation > When I tried to bring this up with a few major ad platforms, the conversation always followed a pred…

> One rep I had known for years finally admitted the truth off the record. "Dude, we know," he said. "Everyone knows. But if we filtered it all out properly, our revenue would drop 40% overnight, and investors would have a meltdown." Lawsuit time?

I mean how much money are you going to spend going after them? Multi billion dollar companies love to take decades to sue.

If the SEC weren't weak maybe they could go after them for fraudulent numbers.

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