Lol I'm not paying shit, have fun everybody else. X is garbage
this post was submitted on 17 Apr 2024
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yeah, I think he is doing it now. Because if you dont boost, unlikely anyone will see what you tweet.
Didn't he say this like 5 times already
Anyone who still uses Twitter/X is an actual fucking moron.
Never used it. Never plan to do so.
True to a degee, but too many international journalists still depend on that plattform. Makes it hard to ditch it completly, until finally one of the alternatives really pick up.
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I work in bot protection and it's a sound idea but doesn't really work in practice. As long as there's more than 1$ of value to be gained it's worth it for the bot makers.
This also makes it so that botting is only accesible to select few actors that have the required resources i.e. russian troll farms or large bot networks from china, in turn this increases their value. This is very good for them.
Reality is that the only way to stop bots is to constantly change up the detection system. This is called a "cat and mouse" sort of problem and it really is the only way to do it. The attacker always has to catch up and it can be trivial that takes them couple of hours to do but it also reveals behavior patterns for marking bot accounts. This actually works really well in practice but requires a lot of dev resources and many companies low-key like bots which is another thread entirely.
As long as there’s more than 1$ of value to be gained it’s worth it for the bot makers.
That's what I was coming in here to suggest, so I'm glad someone in the field was able to back that idea up. I think it's unlikely many bots that aren't made for fun are being put on Twitter unless they are generating a lot more than $1 for whoever is putting them up.
I'll ask anyway. Why do companies like bots?
As Kungen already answered - stats! You can sell bot traffic as real traffic which inflates your numbers.
For stuff like social media, bots increase engagement too. Many new products and networks actually generate a lot of fake content to attract organic growth. I.e. if bot likes your comment you're likely to engage more. If it likes your product review you're likely to review more stuff etc.
Tracking bots can also generate reverse analytics. For example if you know that your competitors are scraping fishing equipment data from your store it could mean they're working on a competing fishing related product.
Lastly, you can feed fake data to bots to manipulate competitors. This is somewhat illegal (no real legal precedent yet afaik though its a clear intent to harm other businesses) but it can really powerful in the wrong hands.
Edit: worth nothing that a lot of bot traffic is good. Sometimes you want to be scraped as it is a form of organic engagement and increases the value of your data and often backlinks growth (e.g. indexers like Google etc)
Perpetual growth/engagement statistics?
How true is the dead internet theory, in your view?
Er du måske en robot??
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Bot protection? Call me ignorant but what exactly do you do?
develop systems that can identify unwanted users like bots, spammers, people who abuse the product and break ToS etc. Most bad actors are very dumb but fighting this at scale is actually very interesting. Also most bots (like 90%) are just scrapers (data collectors) especially when it comes to Twitter which has absurd API pricings but cost almost nothing to scrape lol
people who abuse the product and break TOS
You're welcome.
Hey man it gets me employed and I even get to work on foss on work hours sometimes. Thanks! :)
Oh my god I’m a fuckin idiot. Granted, I’ve had a couple drinks tonight but I thought you were protecting bots… not protecting against them lol
Protect the bots!!!
yeah sorry "protection against bots" just doesn't roll of the tongue as easily lol
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