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Who's Behind All the 'Pussy in Bio' on X? (nymag.com)
29 points by preciousoo on March 27, 2024 | hide | past | favorite | 21 comments


Pick any trending topic on X and most of them are bots repeating the same takes with slightly AI-enhanced variations. It's a plague.

That and the Hubermanbros thinking he really, truly is showing them the way.


Glad to know Humberman is the next focus for the two minute hate. I felt left out not knowing.


He earned it.


> Spam is hard. No real platform has solved it completely, and none ever will. Spammers evolve, platforms catch up, spammers evolve again, and so on until the last post is posted and the last user signs out.

I find it hard to believe there's not some state of the art technology that can detect (or thwart/disrupt) when a user is legitimately accessing X through the mobile app / website, or a bot hitting it through the API and/or a headless browser scripted type fashion


It's an arms race, and constantly evolving. Detection methods that work today will be avoided by spammers tomorrow. New methods are found and deployed, and then those too are avoided over time.

And there's the balancing of not making your detection so strict that you block the clients you want.


I’ve seen some technically impressive kids reverse engineer and break down anti bot software in order to scalp shoes/tech. It’s definitely possible but the ROI is high.

Do spam botters like this make enough to justify breaking down and bypassing around sophisticated anti spam measures over and over?


What makes you think mobile app and browser interactions couldn't be faked?

Strong reliance on an app with many fingerprintable permissions or on unique device and user identifiers slightly requires spammers/promoters/shills/bots to up their game, nothing more.

This is and has been happening for years, both with advertisement and engagement metrics aw well as content, and for both commercial and political purposes.


What makes you think they won't use the real app on a real phone? Ex. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/click-farms-internet-china-15... (ignore the specifics of that use; the point is that it's totally possible to assemble a rack full of real phones running real apps and run interactions through them)


At the end of the day it's all bits over the wire.


there is; it's called "a bunch of folks at twitter doing manual drudge work who elon thought were unnecessary"



I made a post on HN asking this exact question a couple days ago so seeing this was my personal Christmas haha


it is a pure junk site now. mr musk, i assume, is just pushing the three wheeled wobbly trolly along, just far enough to aid getting trump back to the whitehouse


If you told me his account was hacked I'd believe it.


Hacked by Ketamine is the popular take


This must be happening a ton because I'm not on Twitter anymore yet I know exactly what it's referring to. The bots/ads problem has become a joke/meme around the web.


Charge $0.01 per post. Spam solved. I would pay to live in that world


The reason why the pussy in bio spam is so visible is because they're paying $8/month to have their replies boosted. Adding an additional 1¢ per post is not going to meaningfully shift the economics of it.


Shouldn't either of these allow the site to ban them and then block anyone from signing up again with the same credit card?


Isn't that more or less what's happening? I thought the idea here is that the $8/month subscription gives you priority placement in replies, so it's become a de facto entry level ad tier. At your price point it's 800 of these replies per month per account.


It doesn't seem solved given that a lot of spam comes from $8/month accounts?




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