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Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement

joindatacops.com

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Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement

#281

Post by S3verin »

hermitcrab wrote: post #152
ryandrake wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

There are a ton of settlements with huge fines paid by all sorts of companies, but every time they "admit to no wrongdoing". So they pay but deny any responsibility. This is super common.

Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement

#282

Post by terribleperson »

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #158
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.

Bot problems have gotten worse all across the internet, but I think reddit specifically has gotten worse because of their IPO.

It seems that if you're a social media platform, the most profitable option is to ignore bots while swearing up and down that your users are legitimate and you do everything you can to fight bots.

Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement

#283

Post by satisfice »

satisfice wrote: post #200

Did I understand you to say that you created a script that watches how random visitors move their mice and scroll? WTF? I’m pretty sure that’s either impossible or you have access to pretty scary malware.

I'm glad to know some people are working on things that block that...

https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/mouse-tracking.html

Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement

#284

Post by hermitcrab »

detaro wrote: post #260
hermitcrab wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methbot , but I don't understand how they were making money.

Methbot was running the sites showing ads, so they got a cut. Doesn't transfer to manipulation on Facebook Ads, where I don't think that's a thing in any scenario.

I see. Thanks.

Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement

#285

Post by xanderlewis »

dgfl wrote: post #261
getnormality wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The really ironic thing is that this article demonstrates the correct, purposeful human usage of these stock phrases and is getting skewered for it because it superficially sounds like AI. It's not exemplifying what it's criticizing, it's exemplifying the exact reverse of what it's criticizing. "It's not X, it's Y" is for when you know your reader will think X, and you want them to understand the difference between t…

I mostly disagree. > I was not just counting clicks; I was watching behavior. This is completely superfluous. The rest of the paragraph is fine, but the only real ChatGPTism is this one. > They are not just hitting your site and leaving; they are programmed to mimic engagement In this case it’s a valid sentence. What makes it sound overly AI are the semicolon and the timing, which is exactly the usual “it’s not just…

> What makes it sound overly AI are the semicolon and the timing

It's very disappointing that it now seems to be commonly believed that semicolons and em dashes are a sign of AI. Semicolons have been used as a useful tool for a long time; a comma here would simply be wrong.

Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement

#286

Post by simul007 »

Hi HN, I posted yesterday thinking nobody would care and was ready to just leave it alone. Waking up today to see all these comments absolutely shocked me.

Here are answers to the main questions I'm seeing:

Regarding the writing style: Look, I used AI to edit the article for clarity and professionalism only for the blog. This is a business website, not a personal blog. If you want the raw, unedited version, check this Reddit link:

https://www.reddit.com/r/DataCops/s/vieMBQO8Lg

I find it ironic that some people are more focused on criticizing the writing style than addressing the actual problem I'm documenting.

About sharing the script: Sophisticated bot detection can't rely on Microsoft Clarity or traditional analytics alone. It requires multiple data points:

Modern bots use specific behavioral patterns at scale with customized browser configurations (not just basic headless browsers). You need to understand frameworks like Puppeteer, Playwright, and Selenium very well to detect them.

You need access to live global datacenter IP databases.

Even when click farms use real phones with real browsers, IP intelligence helps distinguish human from automated behavior. Each device needs a unique IP, when it runs its target activity to avoid fraud detection.

Detection involves analyzing dozens of factors simultaneously.

The data in this article is real. I stand by the findings.

Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement

#287

Post by pjc50 »

mapt wrote: post #189
seviu wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I once worked for the yellow pages in Switzerland. Our paid clients had a dashboard which reported how many users visited their business entry. We at engineering decided to filter out bots. Figures fell dramatically by more than 50%. In less that a day business mandated us to remove the filter. Bots are real people after all

This is essentially fraud. Your company was made aware that it was selling a product with wildly different characteristics than advertised, and chose to cover it up. There are defensible business reasons for this, in having a contract already in place at the old CPM, so being unable to double the CPM and half the views mid-contract... but still pretty much fraud.

It sounds like the customers demanded the fraud remain, for their own internal Potemkin purposes.

Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement

#288

Post by RamtinJ95 »

bluGill wrote: post #173

Ads have been around for a long time. If your great-...-grandpa bought a newspaper ad in 1820 he would have been looking to see if the ad worked (back then 90+% of people were farmers who didn't buy ads, but lets assume you had an ancestor then who was a shopkeeper and thus had potential value in ads). He probably didn't have have modern statistics, but he would pay attention to sales and try to figure out how much v…

Do you have any links to sources around these other ways to get the data? I recently started working in this domain and trying to get up to speed on state of the art regardings these types of things specifically since im in the data team.

Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement

#289

Post by reconnecting »

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…

We've created open-source security analytics [1] that some organizations use for click fraud detection.

The numbers that Google Ads shows as invalid clicks is dramatically different from what our platform detects.

In our cases, most fraudulent clicks come from mobile devices and mobile networks. Also, bots don't load page resources in full, making them easier to detect.

If your organization is struggling with fraud click detection, don't hesitate to reach out by email. We are ready to help.

1. https://github.com/TirrenoTechnologies/tirreno

Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement

#290

Post by dredmorbius »

pjc50 wrote: post #287
mapt wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is essentially fraud. Your company was made aware that it was selling a product with wildly different characteristics than advertised, and chose to cover it up. There are defensible business reasons for this, in having a contract already in place at the old CPM, so being unable to double the CPM and half the views mid-contract... but still pretty much fraud.

It sounds like the customers demanded the fraud remain, for their own internal Potemkin purposes.

Possible, but not substantiated by the GP comment, which makes yours purely speculative.
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