Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement • Hacker News Board

Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement

#301

Post by jklinger410 » Thu, Oct 16, 2025, 7:43 PM UTC

vmaurin wrote: post #280

jklinger410 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they don't allow double tracking, so you have to trust their numbers Facebook Ads and SA360 both allow 3rd party impression and click tracking. Not to mention the myriad of 3rd party analytics tools you can use to track the website. > if you look at IP from their "clicks", you see often a FB/Google datacenter IP range I've never heard this before and seems hilariously simplistic. These megacorps don't have VPNs? >…

I left the industry 4y ago, but at the time, it was impossible to track impressions on FB ads. So when FB tells you "We did display 1000 time your ads", you just have to believe them. For the IP of the click, I have seen it from my own eyes in 2013, from Facebook. About analytic tools, I let you check who is the leader in this market, and about their independence in the click market ... If you have a website that poi…

I'm going to stop going back and forth on this. But let me just say this: verifying paid traffic, within the ad platforms as well as on your website is totally possible.

If you want to second guess the psychology of whether or not the ad "drove" the user to make a purchase or not, that is up for discussion. Or whether Google/META do shady shit in their bidding environment. Absolutely.

But this idea that you can't track everything is bullshit.

Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement

#302

Post by butlike » Thu, Oct 16, 2025, 8:33 PM UTC

dredmorbius wrote: post #290

pjc50 wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> In less that a day business mandated us to remove the filter.

How is that not substantive?

Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement

#303

Post by voltaireodactyl » Thu, Oct 16, 2025, 8:50 PM UTC

butlike wrote: post #302

dredmorbius wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> In less that a day business mandated us to remove the filter. How is that not substantive?

My impression is that the question is whether “business” in this instance refers to the Yellowpages company itself, or the companies that make up their customers base.

Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement

#304

Post by onlyrealcuzzo » Thu, Oct 16, 2025, 8:51 PM UTC

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.

More than that, YouTube pays out per video view, so they were also making non trivial money on their video content.

Fraudsters might not be able to as easily game Facebook since they don't pay per 1000 views or whatever - but they can still drive tons of traffic to websites filled with ads, scams, etc, and they can also be making money to get fake engagement to wannabe influencers, politicians, propaganda, etc

Facebook is WAAAY too big of a business to take on this liability themselves, and try to keep it secret.

They'd face securities fraud from their investors, likely huge government fines, and lawsuits from all of their advertisers.

Idly sitting by and letting the numbers pump a little higher is less of a problem.

Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement

#305

Post by burnte » Thu, Oct 16, 2025, 9:52 PM UTC

bombcar wrote: post #194

burnte wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Isn't the idea that you run google ads on your site, and then have your botnet click the ads on your site, and you get paid for the traffic?

It would but the fact it goes out and does it to other sites is weird. Why would someone else fraudulently click my ads? As an attack, I understand that, I've had that done to me. Just randomly seems odd. Maybe I'm just not creative enough to think of bad things to do with this. :D

Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement

#306

Post by dredmorbius » Thu, Oct 16, 2025, 10:51 PM UTC

voltaireodactyl wrote: post #303

butlike wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In less that a day business mandated us to remove the filter. How is that not substantive?

My impression is that the question is whether “business” in this instance refers to the Yellowpages company itself, or the companies that make up their customers base.

Yes, and my read is that "business" was internal to Yellowpages.

Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement

#307

Post by dcsan » Fri, Oct 17, 2025, 12:27 AM UTC

seviu wrote: post #68

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…

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

Half my advertising budget is wasted, I just don't know which half... In many corporate cases vague metrics meets the KPI better than accurate ones

I worked for one of the mag7 doing customer support bot tech. Clients internal metrics around containment consistently showed better results than ours - even though you'd normally expect them to be putting pressure on their vendor. because it was a kpi for their internal team to look good to their bosses

Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement

#308

Post by dcsan » Fri, Oct 17, 2025, 12:31 AM UTC

VBprogrammer wrote: post #265

ww520 wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Way back when I work in an ad based company, click fraud handling was under my overseeing. We caught about 20 percent of clicks as fraudulent and filtered them out before billing the ad placing vendors. It was a constant battle with the sales team to relax the rules, as any clicks filtered out cut into the sales revenue. Sometimes we got the customers on our side as they ran their own analysis on the billed click rep…

Yeah, the incentives there are obviously misaligned. I wonder if there is a potential way of making advertising click through tracking following the "I cut the cake, you chose the slice" model. Some countries have property taxes where you declare the value and the government retains the right to purchase the property for that value for example. My first thought was to make the advertising cost driven by revenue on th…

I've seen people but cpc campaigns and only place ads that don't convert. So they get the benefit of the branding instead. I guess more modern auction algorithms factor this in

Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement

#309

Post by lsaferite » Fri, Oct 17, 2025, 2:20 AM UTC

mlrtime wrote: post #279

arccy wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if a bot (or whatever latest of download tool) was served gigabytes of video, does that mean a human eventually viewed it? no.

So now we have to pass the touring test before the video is served? :)

It takes a long time to get there, but you'll eventually arrive.

Re: Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement

#310

Post by phil-martin » Fri, Oct 17, 2025, 9:40 AM UTC

seviu wrote: post #68

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…

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

With numbers like, if it scares customers a good strategy is to implement the filtering very gradually over time, over 6 months or a year. The fall off is way less scary, and it can be described as improving bot filtering.

It’s not as honest, but more palatable unfortunately