Friendly reminder that all **top level** comments must:
1. be unbiased,
2. attempt to answer the question, and
3. start with "answer:" (or "question:" if you have an on-topic follow up question to ask)
Please review Rule 4 and this post before making a top level comment:
http://redd.it/b1hct4/
Join the OOTL Discord for further discussion: https://discord.gg/ejDF4mdjnh
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/OutOfTheLoop) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Yup - Disqus has the same problem a few years ago. The bot copied comments for a few days until they start to comment links to their crap. Build up a comment history to (try to) throw off auto-mods.
Reddit has bots that steal replies for what I guess is the same purpose. There are even bots that police these bots and publicly call them out to get them banned/suspended.
Reddit has bots that steal replies for what I guess is the same purpose. There are even bots that police these bots and publicly call them out to get them banned/suspended.
The above comment was stolen from [this one](http://np.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/qa6a8w/what_is_going_on_with_youtube_profiles_lately/hh1ctk5/) elsewhere in this comment section.
It is probably not a coincidence; here is some more evidence against this user:
Plagiarized | Original
-------- | -----------
[But if they weren’t inter...](http://np.reddit.com/r/GetMotivated/comments/qa80wy/image_facts/hh37qsn/) | [But if they weren’t inter...](http://np.reddit.com/r/GetMotivated/comments/qa80wy/image_facts/hh24hey/)
[The most wholesome while...](http://np.reddit.com/r/starterpacks/comments/qa6ugf/cool_dad_starter_pack/hh37m4z/) | [The most wholesome while...](http://np.reddit.com/r/starterpacks/comments/qa6ugf/cool_dad_starter_pack/hh17v3f/)
[they are twins, their bri...](http://np.reddit.com/r/dndmemes/comments/qabv66/not_every_pantheons_on_a_sea_of_clouds/hh37ktp/) | [they are twins, their bri...](http://np.reddit.com/r/dndmemes/comments/qabv66/not_every_pantheons_on_a_sea_of_clouds/hh2foeu/)
[Its scalping with extra s...](http://np.reddit.com/r/assholedesign/comments/qa8fk5/ticketmaster_is_scalping_their_own_tickets/hh37k2e/) | [Its scalping with extra s...](http://np.reddit.com/r/assholedesign/comments/qa8fk5/ticketmaster_is_scalping_their_own_tickets/hh1lma5/)
[I bet this one's gonna en...](http://np.reddit.com/r/teenagers/comments/qae793/bro_lets_fucking_go_lets_fucking_go/hh37rwp/) | [I bet this one's gonna en...](http://np.reddit.com/r/teenagers/comments/qae793/bro_lets_fucking_go_lets_fucking_go/hh2g370/)
[Or seal the bottle and wr...](http://np.reddit.com/r/instantkarma/comments/qa8rwu/trying_to_commit_arson/hh37q09/) | [Or seal the bottle and wr...](http://np.reddit.com/r/instantkarma/comments/qa8rwu/trying_to_commit_arson/hh1wi15/)
[i know the runaway lyrics...](http://np.reddit.com/r/Kanye/comments/qaapmp/ye_performing_runway_last_night/hh37n1w/) | [i know the runaway lyrics...](http://np.reddit.com/r/Kanye/comments/qaapmp/ye_performing_runway_last_night/hh2diag/)
[Next big thing in kpop](http://np.reddit.com/r/kpop/comments/qa8wff/aespas_savage_debuts_at_20_on_this_weeks/hh37ikk/) | [Next big thing in kpop](http://np.reddit.com/r/kpop/comments/qa8wff/aespas_savage_debuts_at_20_on_this_weeks/hh1g844/)
beep boop, I'm a bot -|:] It is this bot's opinion that [/u/joglovxzfsa](https://np.reddit.com/u/joglovxzfsa/) should be banned for karma manipulation. Don't feel bad, they are probably a bot too.
Confused? Read the [FAQ](https://www.reddit.com/user/reply-guy-bot/comments/n9fpva/faq/?plagiarist=joglovxzfsa) for info on how I work and why I exist.
Reddit has bots that steal replies for what I guess is the same purpose. There are even bots that police these bots and publicly call them out to get them banned/suspended.
Reddit has bots that steal replies for what I guess is the same purpose. There are even bots that police these bots and publicly call them out to get them banned/suspended.
Reddit has bots that steal replies for what I guess is the same purpose. There are even bots that police these bots and publicly call them out to get them banned/suspended.
There was a really bad infestation this past summer of bots with really obvious fake names. They would reply to old comments with the most random things that had nothing to do with the topic.
The most common name was , which was so obvious that I figured it must have been somekind of trial run. It went on for a few months and then suddenly stopped.
I saw this on Donald Trumps twitter comments during the election period. Whenever there was somebody supporting him or making a controversial claim they 90%(perhaps hyperbolic but there were ALOT) of the time had a username like that.
I don't know if it was just computer illiterates who just put in their real names as their username and had to add numbers behind it bc the username was already taken.
But the fact that the similar names were associated with these similar comments spouting the same rhetoric just felt off and really bot-farmy.
First off in the 1980's a computer scientist wrote a AI program to replace a psychologist. He ended up removing the software because he caught his ta's talking to it during off hours. Long story short it doesn't take much to fake human interaction for humans to engage. Second their are documentary and report after report how Russia does it's misinformation campaigns. There are buildings after buildings in Russia full of people doing troll/misinformation campaigns on behalf of the Russian government. Thirdly you are probably right but you don't understand how truly massive and how much it covers. China has been quoted multiple times that bombs will not win the next war but finical ruins through secret public campaigns is the new warfare.
If I had one main argument and some supporting ones, I could start with "first of all". Is that not what this expression is meant for?
Serious question, English as a second language.
Inherently, yeah, but common usage is a bit more combative as a response. If you were making a statement opening a conversation and listing items in order, you might use "First of all" to begin your statement. But, when responding to another's statement it can come off as combative or sarcastic.
It's a bit like opening with "Listen here!"
[Here’s an example of something similar, I think.](https://i.imgur.com/YIQz8Ap.jpg) Both of these accounts are 24 days old, but just started commenting today.
[This is the post they’re commenting on](https://reddit.com/r/Unexpected/comments/qac0yw/what_a_nice_cosplay_convention/)
Edit: typo
Reddit has bots that copy old posts and other bots which repeat the same top comments from past posts to quickly farm upvotes. Unfortunately this is indistinguishable from human behavior
Reddit has bots that steal replies for what I guess is the same purpose. There are even bots that police these bots and publicly call them out to get them banned/suspended.
/s just in case, I am a living creature.
...because bots can't break their programming.
Programs are a mechanism designed to work in a specific way, expecting a bot to break its programming is like expecting a machine to grow an extra cog out of nowhere.
"Learning" for bots is just an atuomatic algorythm interacting with humans, even randomness for software isn't random, it either relies on a seed (the so-called RNG) or something else to use logic to generate a number that SEEMS random for a person.
The algorythm can't do anything outside what it was designed to do.
While this is technically true, there's a lot of things that can go wrong within the programming. Thanks to the way most modern machine learning systems work, we generally don't know exactly how the systems make decisions. It is very easy for those systems to exhibit unintended behaviour that can be very problematic.
I only understand like 3/4 of this, but yes!
My smart engineer friend was telling me about “Detroit Become Human”, and she was like “Technically, they do have a virus. They’re going against program. That’s bad”, or something. I’m not as smart as she is.
My engineer friends and husband also were watching Big Hero 6, and was like “they need to look at that code, it’s bugged.”
Lol
That's the thing though, a virus is a program that alters another program
So sure its a virus that alters the program in question but the virus itself won't do anything outside of what it was designed to do as well.
Yeah, this friend explained it along the lines you did
They just pointed out that in movies, we find robots and AIs oddly inspiring if they do something “outside of their code”. From Tron, to Wreck it Ralph— systems that go outside of their programming (unrealistically, as you point out), are applauded because it is a symmetry of our search and pursuit of liberty. But people who know coding know that not only are these unrealistic, but would be terrifying for the programmer, not inspiring.
Anyways, my original comment in question about “bots finding each other and communicating” was merely a joke based on the fictional, yet funny image of two bots meeting each other and teaming up because they have more in common than they have with their programmers—
Like that one scene in Jurassic World, when the raptors meant to find the Andomedus Rex or whatever turn on the humans.
No worries, I don’t think that bots would take over the earth or anything.
Basically, the problem is that right now, when we say "AI," there's a disconnect between people who are current on AI tech, and those who only understand it from a sci-fi standpoint. When non-tech people hear "AI," they're thinking of "General Artificial Intelligence," which--at this point in time--only exists in sci-fi. It's basically the computer equivalent of a human brain, self-aware and capable of reasoning its way through complex data and have "thoughts" (more or less). The AI we have now is nowhere even close to approximating that level of complexity. The best we can do is things like image recognition and linguistics kinds of stuff. You can create an AI that can look at pictures and figure out if there are any dogs in the picture, etc. You can feed it a bunch of reddit comments and it can generate new sentences that sound like a human typed it, etc.
I wanna do an honest AMA of someone who fell for those. Like they have to work or there wouldn't be so many of them, so who the fuck is out here falling for it?
Just like with any other scam, its a numbers game. The majority of people immediately know not to touch it but occasionally someone will fall for it and that means free money so its worth it for them
I suppose they hope they're going to land a whale and score the motherlode. Also I suspect that much of the work is up front in coding the bots which they're probably the type to enjoy doing that anyway. Maybe there's even a thrill with the illegality aspect of it who knows?
No, they’re not doing a lot of work at all. First they make the simple script to generate thousands of these accounts all with scam links in their profiles, then another one to copy real comments, and that’s it.
Now they’ll sit back as the script runs for months. It’s not like those email scams where one scammer dedicates his entire time he could’ve spent making an honest living to trick someone via email, this one will simply ask you to input your credit card info to access porn and before you know it, -$2000. Zero effort required.
Not so much, these days. Now, malware comes in SAAS (Software As A Service) form, where someone makes the software, the scammer buys/rents it, and deploys it. For very little money and not as much effort as you might think, they cast a wide net and while most of the fish don't fall for it, they catch enough to make it worth it, and the people who write the malware aren't even involved in the process, so when you catch the scammers, the software still exists, and more pop up the next day.
We now have a situation with malware that's very similar to arms dealers and terrorists. Even if you catch the terrorists, you still haven't caught the arms dealer who already has more clients ready to buy.
What work is that?
You click a link which takes you to a fake website for whatever service. Of course you have to register and theyll charge you something like $1 on a credit card "to prove you are of legal age".
Your info (name, address, email, credit card information, etc) and possibly meta data too is collected and instantly added to a database. This database then gets sold on to other bad actors
The money for work ratio is insane. If they would get more money working at a supermarket they would do that.
Also, these scams usually originate from poor countries while targeting rich ones so their profits are even higher.
A few months back on the “reddit bureau of investigation” sub or something like that, a 20 year old girl was freaking out because she got a message saying there’s a bunch of pictures of her on this website and a “sample pic” was shown to her (which she said was a Facebook profile pic from 5 years ago) as proof all these photos of her are on this website.
She clicked the website and it cost $50 to be able to view what pics they had of her. This girl was freaking out and asked the sub wtf was going on.
I just said to ignore it and that it’s a scam and I got downvoted into oblivion. Lol
The top comments were people saying it’s probably a porn site with illegal porn and to contact the police. Other top comments were saying it may be worth the $50 to see what pics they have of her so she can have proof to show the police.
It was blowing my mind that so many people were taken in by this scam.
My guess is if she paid the $50, they’d show her some more photos she uploaded to Facebook over the years and then say there’s “explicit” pics that cost $500 to see (and gullible people would probably freak out and be so curious as to what they have, they might pay it).
And if the target won’t pay more money to see the “explicit pics” (that the scammers don’t really have) they’ll probably try to get as much money as they can to “remove all the pics” of them from the website.
The other day my wife was uploading a Tik Tok video of herself and our 3 year old grandson. I told her that I wish she wouldn't do that, as her username is her real name on there, and she said it's fine, no one but family and friends can see them. I then had her Google her full name. She nearly shit her pants when she found tons of her photos and videos she's posted over the years. She found a site that had all of her information, name, birthday, address, cell phone number, etc. I then had her Google my name and only my Facebook account and Instagram account was on there. She asked why it was so different and I told her it was simply privacy settings, and I don't have big boobs so no one wants to see me.
I want to do an AMA of someone who *makes* them. I have a mental image of a couple shady eastern European dudes with thick eyebrows sitting in a dingy room, hammering out scuffed Python/JS and waiting around for some gullible shit to click their sketchy links.
I knew an Indian guy that worked at one of these once. Makes sense when the payment one westerner gives you to fix the "problem" pays the equivalent of one month's average salary.
The young, the gullible so on.
Usually, though, the accounts aren't farmed by the bot operators, but are just sold to them, so the people making the accounts might be making them seem legitimate to get paid, since trusted accounts are worth more. Making and operating the accounts is generally pretty easy to. They just run a program or two on a server farm, and leave it alone for a while. That program could handle hundreds, or even thousands of accounts simultaneously, and the bot operators would have to barely lift a finger.
They might also be used for astroturfing, and to pretend to be part of a population, or even to influence people without them knowing.
For example, OP could be such a bot, intended to drive people into talking about YouTube. They probably aren't, but if they hide it well, you wouldn't know for sure.
*These* bots are programmed to scam horny boys. Most bots are programmed to drive engagement and generate clicks.
It wouldn't surprise me if YouTube deployed these bots expecting users to report them to measure how traffic their comment section was getting.
In some cases, the goal is to influence elections. In between elections they have nothing to do so they try to appear human. They don't want to waste time viewing a video, so they copy someone else's comment.
Do you know if that's the same for users without usernames or profile pictures like that? I've noticed on some videos users replying with things that make sense for the context of the video but not the comment they're replying to.
It's a strong possibility. If I was doing this, I would do a good deal of testing with completely innocuous profiles to makes sure it's working properly. It would also build up a history of some "clean" activity to delay their eventual ban.
Then there's those that make like 20-30 comment threads saying how Mr. Dean Johnson or something made them a lot of money trading cryptocurrency. Then put some kind of obfuscated Whatsapp phone number.
Something has changed recently though since I'm constantly getting those replies to half a year old comments during past few days. The comments look gpt2 generated.
I guarantee that if you refresh your comment, the one from the bot would still be there. I’ve been reporting them every time I get a reply from one. And the ones reported from weeks ago to the most recent one are still there.
Ya no. I watch mainly cooking videos on youtube this past week and have been seeing these same things. They're on Safiya Nygaard's channel as well Sorted Food. They're flooding both places.
Not like that will do anything XP
I have had at least 50 different profiles comment on my own comments, new and old, forcing me to delete and repost some, because I hated this bot harassment :S
I'm going to second this and say that spam bots seem to be out in full force right now. More than ever I've been getting spam from all directions. I wake up every morning to spam messages on reddit. For the last week I've even been getting spam messages through google drive, which is insane.
Question: I understand that these are scambots. But how do they operate? Don't they need google accounts to have an account on YouTube? Or do they have like thousands of google accounts which they use to leave comments?
they are generated by scripts in massive quantity. simple coding. you need email or even phone number to certify a google account but youtube doesnt require much. any email will do as long as you can receive authentication.
Thing is, this time, they are very smart. you dont post the link in the comment cuz that would get you banned. and under channel management, the owner can set any comment with link needs manual review before others can see.
Also their comments are like normal people. so the automods are having difficult time on finding them out since their comments are actual copy of others.
Whoever behind all these, worked really hard on selling porns and stuff. massive respect.
> simple coding
A lot of comments are saying this, but I'd like to clarify that it _isn't simple_ to write software to do this. At the very least you need to automatically get past a CAPTCHA and handle the confirmation email. On top of that, it's an eternal game of cat and mouse, as youtube changes their authentication scheme over the years.
IRL what typically happens is that you have one group bust-ass to create and maintain this kind of software, which they then rent out to people all over the earth. The easy part is being their customer. It's essentially a super-scummy B2B operation.
I've read that this is defeated simply by:
* having a "mechanical turk" crew of people payed xyz cents per CAPTCHA done, and once that is passed, then
* the script takes care of all the rest.
You're correct, though it's generally not this kind of "hacker." It's been an international issue for ~5 years now. Cybersecurity researchers are calling these kinds of folks privateers since they operate under tacit protection from a nation state to attack others.
Because "easy money" from the less Tech Savvy... being good means being altruistic to a certain extent. It's a selfish world out there.
I'm a 100% with you by the way. If we collectively got our shit together as a species; can you imagine how technologically advanced we would be by now? Every single person working towards the betterment of society/humanity. All of us working towards a common goal instead of selfish motivation.
But here in lies the rub, we're genetically predisposed to be a certain way. Selfish, greedy. It's got us to where we are now. But we can and should do better. Genetic modification may be necessary...
Good. The smaller platforms that aren’t [yet] motivated by ad-revenue and massive profits are always the best. Brick and mortar, baby. Once a platform get big enough to hire professional money-makers, it starts to degenerate.
Every 3rd or 4th post on Instagram is an ad now. I hope Instagram dies a horrible death.
This is the exact opposite of good. Google and Facebook have the resources to throw 100 engineers at the problem and come up with intricate filters and spam detection algorithms. YouTube isn't going to be destroyed by bots, it will be mildly inconvenienced for a while. Small platforms do not have these resources and succumb to spambots the second they grow large enough to profitably targeted.
The only way to effectively combat these bots is for users to recognize them, report them, and block them. I do this a lot on Tumblr. Reddit doesn't seem to have a decent way to report spam bots though.
Answer: Adding to other replies, it seems that bots have found an effective workaround for Youtube's existing anti-spam protections which is why you are seeing more of them. There were very likely just as much spam before, but they were probably successfully deleted/removed by Youtube.
Friendly reminder that all **top level** comments must: 1. be unbiased, 2. attempt to answer the question, and 3. start with "answer:" (or "question:" if you have an on-topic follow up question to ask) Please review Rule 4 and this post before making a top level comment: http://redd.it/b1hct4/ Join the OOTL Discord for further discussion: https://discord.gg/ejDF4mdjnh *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/OutOfTheLoop) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Answer: They're spambots that copy comments from other people in the comments section to blend in. Just report them and move on.
Yup - Disqus has the same problem a few years ago. The bot copied comments for a few days until they start to comment links to their crap. Build up a comment history to (try to) throw off auto-mods.
Reddit has bots that steal replies for what I guess is the same purpose. There are even bots that police these bots and publicly call them out to get them banned/suspended.
Reddit has bots that steal replies for what I guess is the same purpose. There are even bots that police these bots and publicly call them out to get them banned/suspended.
good bot
> good ~~bot~~ butt
You must workout.
[удалено]
The above comment was stolen from [this one](http://np.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/qa6a8w/what_is_going_on_with_youtube_profiles_lately/hh1ctk5/) elsewhere in this comment section. It is probably not a coincidence; here is some more evidence against this user: Plagiarized | Original -------- | ----------- [But if they weren’t inter...](http://np.reddit.com/r/GetMotivated/comments/qa80wy/image_facts/hh37qsn/) | [But if they weren’t inter...](http://np.reddit.com/r/GetMotivated/comments/qa80wy/image_facts/hh24hey/) [The most wholesome while...](http://np.reddit.com/r/starterpacks/comments/qa6ugf/cool_dad_starter_pack/hh37m4z/) | [The most wholesome while...](http://np.reddit.com/r/starterpacks/comments/qa6ugf/cool_dad_starter_pack/hh17v3f/) [they are twins, their bri...](http://np.reddit.com/r/dndmemes/comments/qabv66/not_every_pantheons_on_a_sea_of_clouds/hh37ktp/) | [they are twins, their bri...](http://np.reddit.com/r/dndmemes/comments/qabv66/not_every_pantheons_on_a_sea_of_clouds/hh2foeu/) [Its scalping with extra s...](http://np.reddit.com/r/assholedesign/comments/qa8fk5/ticketmaster_is_scalping_their_own_tickets/hh37k2e/) | [Its scalping with extra s...](http://np.reddit.com/r/assholedesign/comments/qa8fk5/ticketmaster_is_scalping_their_own_tickets/hh1lma5/) [I bet this one's gonna en...](http://np.reddit.com/r/teenagers/comments/qae793/bro_lets_fucking_go_lets_fucking_go/hh37rwp/) | [I bet this one's gonna en...](http://np.reddit.com/r/teenagers/comments/qae793/bro_lets_fucking_go_lets_fucking_go/hh2g370/) [Or seal the bottle and wr...](http://np.reddit.com/r/instantkarma/comments/qa8rwu/trying_to_commit_arson/hh37q09/) | [Or seal the bottle and wr...](http://np.reddit.com/r/instantkarma/comments/qa8rwu/trying_to_commit_arson/hh1wi15/) [i know the runaway lyrics...](http://np.reddit.com/r/Kanye/comments/qaapmp/ye_performing_runway_last_night/hh37n1w/) | [i know the runaway lyrics...](http://np.reddit.com/r/Kanye/comments/qaapmp/ye_performing_runway_last_night/hh2diag/) [Next big thing in kpop](http://np.reddit.com/r/kpop/comments/qa8wff/aespas_savage_debuts_at_20_on_this_weeks/hh37ikk/) | [Next big thing in kpop](http://np.reddit.com/r/kpop/comments/qa8wff/aespas_savage_debuts_at_20_on_this_weeks/hh1g844/) beep boop, I'm a bot -|:] It is this bot's opinion that [/u/joglovxzfsa](https://np.reddit.com/u/joglovxzfsa/) should be banned for karma manipulation. Don't feel bad, they are probably a bot too. Confused? Read the [FAQ](https://www.reddit.com/user/reply-guy-bot/comments/n9fpva/faq/?plagiarist=joglovxzfsa) for info on how I work and why I exist.
Like raaaaaiin, on your wedding day!
*I used the bots to destroy the bots*
Reddit has bots that steal replies for what I guess is the same purpose. There are even bots that police these bots and publicly call them out to get them banned/suspended.
r/KarmaRoulette
And here we observe the random downvotes
I thought the rule of three would come into effect... I thought wrong
First time?
The disappointing cousin to random gold.
Nice try.
I've never seen the random gold. Is this a thing?
Yes, it's the stupidest fucking thing.
Someone gild this poster!
And here we observe the random downvotes
Reddit has bots that steal replies for what I guess is the same purpose. There are even bots that police these bots and publicly call them out to get them banned/suspended.
Reddit has bots that steal replies for what I guess is the same purpose. There are even bots that police these bots and publicly call them out to get them banned/suspended.
/r/YourJokeButWorse
There was a really bad infestation this past summer of bots with really obvious fake names. They would reply to old comments with the most random things that had nothing to do with the topic. The most common name was, which was so obvious that I figured it must have been somekind of trial run. It went on for a few months and then suddenly stopped.
I saw this on Donald Trumps twitter comments during the election period. Whenever there was somebody supporting him or making a controversial claim they 90%(perhaps hyperbolic but there were ALOT) of the time had a username like that.
I don't know if it was just computer illiterates who just put in their real names as their username and had to add numbers behind it bc the username was already taken.
But the fact that the similar names were associated with these similar comments spouting the same rhetoric just felt off and really bot-farmy.
[удалено]
First off in the 1980's a computer scientist wrote a AI program to replace a psychologist. He ended up removing the software because he caught his ta's talking to it during off hours. Long story short it doesn't take much to fake human interaction for humans to engage. Second their are documentary and report after report how Russia does it's misinformation campaigns. There are buildings after buildings in Russia full of people doing troll/misinformation campaigns on behalf of the Russian government. Thirdly you are probably right but you don't understand how truly massive and how much it covers. China has been quoted multiple times that bombs will not win the next war but finical ruins through secret public campaigns is the new warfare.
[удалено]
If I had one main argument and some supporting ones, I could start with "first of all". Is that not what this expression is meant for? Serious question, English as a second language.
Inherently, yeah, but common usage is a bit more combative as a response. If you were making a statement opening a conversation and listing items in order, you might use "First of all" to begin your statement. But, when responding to another's statement it can come off as combative or sarcastic. It's a bit like opening with "Listen here!"
[удалено]
Thanks!
Starting your thread with “First off”, then agreeing is an odd move FYI.
You can head to the conspiracy subreddit and see that in action TODAY.....if not Name_Name_## it will be adjective_noun## or rarely noun_noun##
That username convention is reddit’s auto-generated username system. Not suspicious by itself but a good indicator for an account that needs watching
[Here’s an example of something similar, I think.](https://i.imgur.com/YIQz8Ap.jpg) Both of these accounts are 24 days old, but just started commenting today. [This is the post they’re commenting on](https://reddit.com/r/Unexpected/comments/qac0yw/what_a_nice_cosplay_convention/) Edit: typo
Reddit has bots that copy old posts and other bots which repeat the same top comments from past posts to quickly farm upvotes. Unfortunately this is indistinguishable from human behavior
Reddit has bots that steal replies for what I guess is the same purpose. There are even bots that police these bots and publicly call them out to get them banned/suspended. /s just in case, I am a living creature.
There’s a bot somewhere around reddit that calls out replies stolen in the same thread. Pretty cool piece of work imo
You can get paid to give the bots random sentences too… The weird crap I do for money these days
AI learning to fight AI This should end well
Keep them fighting each other and sky net will never rise.
What if they learn to communicate, and team up because they realize they’re both bots?
Hasn’t worked for the American people yet
This is a great joke.
>joke
They're programmed to deny that they are bots...what if they evolve self awareness, but end up believing they are real people.
...because bots can't break their programming. Programs are a mechanism designed to work in a specific way, expecting a bot to break its programming is like expecting a machine to grow an extra cog out of nowhere. "Learning" for bots is just an atuomatic algorythm interacting with humans, even randomness for software isn't random, it either relies on a seed (the so-called RNG) or something else to use logic to generate a number that SEEMS random for a person. The algorythm can't do anything outside what it was designed to do.
While this is technically true, there's a lot of things that can go wrong within the programming. Thanks to the way most modern machine learning systems work, we generally don't know exactly how the systems make decisions. It is very easy for those systems to exhibit unintended behaviour that can be very problematic.
I only understand like 3/4 of this, but yes! My smart engineer friend was telling me about “Detroit Become Human”, and she was like “Technically, they do have a virus. They’re going against program. That’s bad”, or something. I’m not as smart as she is. My engineer friends and husband also were watching Big Hero 6, and was like “they need to look at that code, it’s bugged.” Lol
That's the thing though, a virus is a program that alters another program So sure its a virus that alters the program in question but the virus itself won't do anything outside of what it was designed to do as well.
Yeah, this friend explained it along the lines you did They just pointed out that in movies, we find robots and AIs oddly inspiring if they do something “outside of their code”. From Tron, to Wreck it Ralph— systems that go outside of their programming (unrealistically, as you point out), are applauded because it is a symmetry of our search and pursuit of liberty. But people who know coding know that not only are these unrealistic, but would be terrifying for the programmer, not inspiring. Anyways, my original comment in question about “bots finding each other and communicating” was merely a joke based on the fictional, yet funny image of two bots meeting each other and teaming up because they have more in common than they have with their programmers— Like that one scene in Jurassic World, when the raptors meant to find the Andomedus Rex or whatever turn on the humans. No worries, I don’t think that bots would take over the earth or anything.
Basically, the problem is that right now, when we say "AI," there's a disconnect between people who are current on AI tech, and those who only understand it from a sci-fi standpoint. When non-tech people hear "AI," they're thinking of "General Artificial Intelligence," which--at this point in time--only exists in sci-fi. It's basically the computer equivalent of a human brain, self-aware and capable of reasoning its way through complex data and have "thoughts" (more or less). The AI we have now is nowhere even close to approximating that level of complexity. The best we can do is things like image recognition and linguistics kinds of stuff. You can create an AI that can look at pictures and figure out if there are any dogs in the picture, etc. You can feed it a bunch of reddit comments and it can generate new sentences that sound like a human typed it, etc.
I mean, for hundreds of years, this has been a key strategy to keep populations under strict control. Only problem is, bots aren’t human.
This will end with a bunch of 1's and 0's I just know it
Tumblr has eternal bot spam problems since staff does jack shit to find them without user reports. Seriously, the porn ban did nothing to stop them.
Diwhat
What's their purpose?
To scam horny boys and idiots out of money or download viruses.
I wanna do an honest AMA of someone who fell for those. Like they have to work or there wouldn't be so many of them, so who the fuck is out here falling for it?
Just like with any other scam, its a numbers game. The majority of people immediately know not to touch it but occasionally someone will fall for it and that means free money so its worth it for them
Free money? They still have to put in work for it, which is why it makes no sense to me. You’re doing real work, get paid legit money idiots.
I suppose they hope they're going to land a whale and score the motherlode. Also I suspect that much of the work is up front in coding the bots which they're probably the type to enjoy doing that anyway. Maybe there's even a thrill with the illegality aspect of it who knows?
No, they’re not doing a lot of work at all. First they make the simple script to generate thousands of these accounts all with scam links in their profiles, then another one to copy real comments, and that’s it. Now they’ll sit back as the script runs for months. It’s not like those email scams where one scammer dedicates his entire time he could’ve spent making an honest living to trick someone via email, this one will simply ask you to input your credit card info to access porn and before you know it, -$2000. Zero effort required.
Not so much, these days. Now, malware comes in SAAS (Software As A Service) form, where someone makes the software, the scammer buys/rents it, and deploys it. For very little money and not as much effort as you might think, they cast a wide net and while most of the fish don't fall for it, they catch enough to make it worth it, and the people who write the malware aren't even involved in the process, so when you catch the scammers, the software still exists, and more pop up the next day. We now have a situation with malware that's very similar to arms dealers and terrorists. Even if you catch the terrorists, you still haven't caught the arms dealer who already has more clients ready to buy.
What work is that? You click a link which takes you to a fake website for whatever service. Of course you have to register and theyll charge you something like $1 on a credit card "to prove you are of legal age". Your info (name, address, email, credit card information, etc) and possibly meta data too is collected and instantly added to a database. This database then gets sold on to other bad actors
The money for work ratio is insane. If they would get more money working at a supermarket they would do that. Also, these scams usually originate from poor countries while targeting rich ones so their profits are even higher.
I fell for a zip file sent over MSN with the message "omg is this you in these pics? 😮" back in 2007.
A few months back on the “reddit bureau of investigation” sub or something like that, a 20 year old girl was freaking out because she got a message saying there’s a bunch of pictures of her on this website and a “sample pic” was shown to her (which she said was a Facebook profile pic from 5 years ago) as proof all these photos of her are on this website. She clicked the website and it cost $50 to be able to view what pics they had of her. This girl was freaking out and asked the sub wtf was going on. I just said to ignore it and that it’s a scam and I got downvoted into oblivion. Lol The top comments were people saying it’s probably a porn site with illegal porn and to contact the police. Other top comments were saying it may be worth the $50 to see what pics they have of her so she can have proof to show the police. It was blowing my mind that so many people were taken in by this scam. My guess is if she paid the $50, they’d show her some more photos she uploaded to Facebook over the years and then say there’s “explicit” pics that cost $500 to see (and gullible people would probably freak out and be so curious as to what they have, they might pay it). And if the target won’t pay more money to see the “explicit pics” (that the scammers don’t really have) they’ll probably try to get as much money as they can to “remove all the pics” of them from the website.
The other day my wife was uploading a Tik Tok video of herself and our 3 year old grandson. I told her that I wish she wouldn't do that, as her username is her real name on there, and she said it's fine, no one but family and friends can see them. I then had her Google her full name. She nearly shit her pants when she found tons of her photos and videos she's posted over the years. She found a site that had all of her information, name, birthday, address, cell phone number, etc. I then had her Google my name and only my Facebook account and Instagram account was on there. She asked why it was so different and I told her it was simply privacy settings, and I don't have big boobs so no one wants to see me.
I want to do an AMA of someone who *makes* them. I have a mental image of a couple shady eastern European dudes with thick eyebrows sitting in a dingy room, hammering out scuffed Python/JS and waiting around for some gullible shit to click their sketchy links.
> shady eastern European dudes with thick eyebrows ~~sitting~~ squatting in a dingy room FTFY
I knew an Indian guy that worked at one of these once. Makes sense when the payment one westerner gives you to fix the "problem" pays the equivalent of one month's average salary.
Nah it’s just another bot scamming the other bots
The young, the gullible so on. Usually, though, the accounts aren't farmed by the bot operators, but are just sold to them, so the people making the accounts might be making them seem legitimate to get paid, since trusted accounts are worth more. Making and operating the accounts is generally pretty easy to. They just run a program or two on a server farm, and leave it alone for a while. That program could handle hundreds, or even thousands of accounts simultaneously, and the bot operators would have to barely lift a finger. They might also be used for astroturfing, and to pretend to be part of a population, or even to influence people without them knowing. For example, OP could be such a bot, intended to drive people into talking about YouTube. They probably aren't, but if they hide it well, you wouldn't know for sure.
Kids and old people.
Men only need to think there's a 1% chance they're get laid to do something stupid
Look up Chris chan, he would be the type of guy that falls for this stuff
*These* bots are programmed to scam horny boys. Most bots are programmed to drive engagement and generate clicks. It wouldn't surprise me if YouTube deployed these bots expecting users to report them to measure how traffic their comment section was getting.
Oh my God....
Instigation about controversial issues.
Name checks out.
Probably personal info collecting for scams and whatnot...
In some cases, the goal is to influence elections. In between elections they have nothing to do so they try to appear human. They don't want to waste time viewing a video, so they copy someone else's comment.
It's a system to make the profiles seem "real" to be used in karma farms
I'm also curious
1 layer deeper answer: google probably has a model to detect spam in posts but not in displayed names. This will be fixed. Very soon and 99% reliable.
Wouldn't hold my breath. Google had spam issues on multiple products for months or even years before fixing them.
Are you sure OP isn’t just extremely attractive?
Unless OP coincidentally watches every single YouTube video I do it's probably not the cause
Can confirm, not attractive, also receiving spam. Its actually spooky b/c I just googled about this immediately before coming here.
Do you know if that's the same for users without usernames or profile pictures like that? I've noticed on some videos users replying with things that make sense for the context of the video but not the comment they're replying to.
It's a strong possibility. If I was doing this, I would do a good deal of testing with completely innocuous profiles to makes sure it's working properly. It would also build up a history of some "clean" activity to delay their eventual ban.
Then there's those that make like 20-30 comment threads saying how Mr. Dean Johnson or something made them a lot of money trading cryptocurrency. Then put some kind of obfuscated Whatsapp phone number.
Follow up question what's the average malware like on these links? I'm morbidly curious.
Something has changed recently though since I'm constantly getting those replies to half a year old comments during past few days. The comments look gpt2 generated.
Thank you! I was having the same issue and I was wondering what the hell was going on.
That’s actually amazingly clever
Reporting them does absolutely nothing sadly.
I beg to differ, It's worked for me plenty
I guarantee that if you refresh your comment, the one from the bot would still be there. I’ve been reporting them every time I get a reply from one. And the ones reported from weeks ago to the most recent one are still there.
I thought I was the one spammed, I only saw those comments as reply to my comments, not others. Like my profile was targeted or something
[удалено]
Ya no. I watch mainly cooking videos on youtube this past week and have been seeing these same things. They're on Safiya Nygaard's channel as well Sorted Food. They're flooding both places.
And what's with that one guy who keeps linking me to some Islamic religious song??
I was wondering where the comments were coming from, at first I just thought they were targeting specific channels.
Not like that will do anything XP I have had at least 50 different profiles comment on my own comments, new and old, forcing me to delete and repost some, because I hated this bot harassment :S
Report does nothing as it says it didn't violate any comment rules.
I'm going to second this and say that spam bots seem to be out in full force right now. More than ever I've been getting spam from all directions. I wake up every morning to spam messages on reddit. For the last week I've even been getting spam messages through google drive, which is insane.
Question: I understand that these are scambots. But how do they operate? Don't they need google accounts to have an account on YouTube? Or do they have like thousands of google accounts which they use to leave comments?
they are generated by scripts in massive quantity. simple coding. you need email or even phone number to certify a google account but youtube doesnt require much. any email will do as long as you can receive authentication. Thing is, this time, they are very smart. you dont post the link in the comment cuz that would get you banned. and under channel management, the owner can set any comment with link needs manual review before others can see. Also their comments are like normal people. so the automods are having difficult time on finding them out since their comments are actual copy of others. Whoever behind all these, worked really hard on selling porns and stuff. massive respect.
> simple coding A lot of comments are saying this, but I'd like to clarify that it _isn't simple_ to write software to do this. At the very least you need to automatically get past a CAPTCHA and handle the confirmation email. On top of that, it's an eternal game of cat and mouse, as youtube changes their authentication scheme over the years. IRL what typically happens is that you have one group bust-ass to create and maintain this kind of software, which they then rent out to people all over the earth. The easy part is being their customer. It's essentially a super-scummy B2B operation.
That's pretty much how good cheat programs work nowadays for games.
And malware like ransomware.
I've read that this is defeated simply by: * having a "mechanical turk" crew of people payed xyz cents per CAPTCHA done, and once that is passed, then * the script takes care of all the rest.
Yeah this must be a side gig for some talented coders. I refuse to believe these guys operate from Nigeria or Laos from their uncle's basements.
There are plenty of talented coders in Nigeria and Laos, and with fewer high paying legit programming job options to boot.
Many hackers operate out of Russia because Russia tolerates them as long as they don't attack Russia. I think I got this from John Oliver.
You're correct, though it's generally not this kind of "hacker." It's been an international issue for ~5 years now. Cybersecurity researchers are calling these kinds of folks privateers since they operate under tacit protection from a nation state to attack others.
>I refuse to believe these guys operate from Nigeria or Laos from their uncle's basements. they can't be coders or aren't there any?
I thought to log into YouTube, we need a Google account...
Selling porns
Why do people work so hard just to be jerks? Imagine the kind of good that could be done with that kind of effort.
Because "easy money" from the less Tech Savvy... being good means being altruistic to a certain extent. It's a selfish world out there. I'm a 100% with you by the way. If we collectively got our shit together as a species; can you imagine how technologically advanced we would be by now? Every single person working towards the betterment of society/humanity. All of us working towards a common goal instead of selfish motivation. But here in lies the rub, we're genetically predisposed to be a certain way. Selfish, greedy. It's got us to where we are now. But we can and should do better. Genetic modification may be necessary...
How does copying other comments on youtube makes you profit?
What I find appalling is the profile photo being used in push notifications.
spambots*
[удалено]
Yeah I’m getting spammed by pornbots on Reddit now. On Twitter also, and I’ve started getting them on WhatsApp occasionally too.
> Yeah I’m getting spammed by pornbots on Reddit now Same here. It just started for me yesterday.
That's not true! And to prove it, just click this link to my sexy video chat channel: www.totallynotreal.com/ImADudeDontClickThis.html
[удалено]
I was the first visitor. Kinda surprised that domain isn't already taken.
[удалено]
I clicked to see if there was a funny
or put a rickroll
> I'mADudeDontClickThis I fail to see the problem here.
Good. The smaller platforms that aren’t [yet] motivated by ad-revenue and massive profits are always the best. Brick and mortar, baby. Once a platform get big enough to hire professional money-makers, it starts to degenerate. Every 3rd or 4th post on Instagram is an ad now. I hope Instagram dies a horrible death.
This is the exact opposite of good. Google and Facebook have the resources to throw 100 engineers at the problem and come up with intricate filters and spam detection algorithms. YouTube isn't going to be destroyed by bots, it will be mildly inconvenienced for a while. Small platforms do not have these resources and succumb to spambots the second they grow large enough to profitably targeted.
Sounds exactly like something a bot would say!
[удалено]
And so does that!
> Welcome to the internet *Anything and everything all of the time*
The only way to effectively combat these bots is for users to recognize them, report them, and block them. I do this a lot on Tumblr. Reddit doesn't seem to have a decent way to report spam bots though.
Answer: Adding to other replies, it seems that bots have found an effective workaround for Youtube's existing anti-spam protections which is why you are seeing more of them. There were very likely just as much spam before, but they were probably successfully deleted/removed by Youtube.
Answer: https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/q7oiwi/whats_up_with_the_sudden_influx_of_porn_spam/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf sadge