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Ask HN: Is Hacker News under attack from spam bots?

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Re: Ask HN: Is Hacker News under attack from spam bots?

#458
post #422

IMO there is likely huge demand for bots that are witty and can write occasional put a useful comment with a link every now and then. It’s going to be interesting how spam evolves. At-least spammers who aren’t lazy. Already many of the recruiting emails I get sound a lot human. They are bots though since they send at 9am everyday

https://xkcd.com/810/

Re: Ask HN: Is Hacker News under attack from spam bots?

#459
post #417

Yup. The site being advertised is proxied through Cloudflare, and they're also using Supabase. Anyone from Cloudflare or Supabase care to remove your abusive customer? Also reported.

The founders are "John Smith" and "Jane Doe", and they're incorporated in Malta. Anyone who does business with this outfit has it coming.

Not all John Smiths are bad, promise.

Re: Ask HN: Is Hacker News under attack from spam bots?

#460
Anyone have some insight into the motivation of spam bot behavior? It doesn't make sense to me that they'd intentionally re-post the same link on a story 100+ times. Perhaps repeating the same link is good for SEO farming? Or somehow there's a belief that 100+ identical comments is more effective than just a few?

Also the comments all seem to end with a 15 character random string, which I assume is just there to add entropy and avoid identical comment detection.

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