634 Diggs, 17 comments, and 100 comment upvotes for Viagra

http://i.imgur.com/yHtLy.png

by talbina • 15 years ago

37 30 15 years ago

i.imgur.com

talbina2• 15 years ago

Does Reddit have the same problem?

Also, would something like this make it to the front page? And if it didn't (because of editorial input), how come it hasn't been deleted?

fwdbureau• 15 years ago

Maybe it's just a new meme?

ojbyrne• 15 years ago

It has been deleted now.

mooism22• 15 years ago

Someone tried it on HN last week.

danilocampos• 15 years ago

Who? The Facebook resume guy?

Splines• 15 years ago

Someone tried astroturfing /r/gaming last week and were called out on it.

Truly blatent spam is extremely rare - it's the stuff that's mostly legitimate that has an ulterior motive that is hard to spot.

adrianN2• 15 years ago

If it provides enough legitimate content to be useful to the users, it will get upvotes regardless of its ulterior motives. At a certain point an advertisement is entertaining enough to be viewed voluntarily. cf Old Spice guy.

jokermatt999• 15 years ago

For a while, there was a major problem with blogspam on the science subreddit. There was a user who would ripoff content from other sites, paste it into a blogspot site, and slap ads on it. It would regularly get upvoted to the top. He's probably still at, and cursing at people in Hungarian when he gets caught. Ask the folks at /r/ReportTheSpammers about "Ralph" sometime if you'd like to know what spam on reddit looks like.

Pewpewarrows• 15 years ago

Reddit has a lot more built-in spam protection than is apparent to the average user. Faking that a vote was actually counted for new or questionable users, getting your account flagged for mass-voting a certain way, etc.

knowsnothing6132• 15 years ago

yeah, you can get something like this to the front page of reddit easily, if you and a couple of guys use a tor browser, and create fake logins, and upboat the content.

Reddit doesn't have good defenses against tor browsing. Tor browsing/hack is the best way to beat reddit defences, since you can circumvent reddit's IP logging, and cookies.

talbina2• 15 years ago

And it was just deleted.

chaosmachine• 15 years ago

That's an impressive number of fake accounts. Here's a permanent screenshot:

http://i.imgur.com/yHtLy.png

I wonder if they're using some kind of blackhat technique to trick regular users into upvoting it.

JonnieCache5• 15 years ago

Very likely an example of the 'sockpuppet management' software discussed here last week IMO.

EDIT: you can still see the page in google's cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...

DanielBMarkham3• 15 years ago

Perhaps this says something about the average Digg user that they would not want to publicly share :)

Sorry for the snarky comment, I just had to. As other commenters have pointed out, we are entering into the age of "online personna warfare" -- which in my mind could end up spawning true AI since the monetary stakes are so high, as annoying as it all is right now.

Brain-teaser question: if you had a hundred friends online, and they all knew you and joked with you and provided support when you were having a bad day, asked about your family, etc. -- as long as they blatantly did not try to sell you anything, perhaps just mentioning a product every few months as part of a normal conversation, would it really matter if they were robots?

Product placement is going to go from actors in movies to robots on internet sites. Right now it's just happening in a very klunky and annoying fashion, but it'll get smoother. Very strange times we live in.

u48998• 15 years ago

Agree. A finer example of such techniques are prevalent here on HN. Recall VirginMobile Nexus and black Friday items with tons and tons of comments. Coincidence? Appropriate timing? VirginMobile ran out of that product by the way.

JonnieCache5• 15 years ago

>would it really matter if they were robots?

Yes, because their only motive is profit. All their jokes, all their friendly advice was only ever given in order to extract some of my money and therefore my time. No matter how far they go to hide this fact, however genuinely useful or comforting their presence, they have only one reason for their existence and that fact would forever offend me and I'm sure others too.

Imagine if one of your human friends behaved in this way, persisted in a relationship with you solely because they were being paid to do so. You would feel violated, and in my mind if that friend were a robot, I would feel more violated. At least in the case of a human, I can reason that they needed the cash.

DanielBMarkham3• 15 years ago

So you're not mad when a Pepsi can appears in your favorite movie but you would be mad if the robot that had been playing a killer game of chess with you for the last hour told a joke that mentioned a famous comedy album?

Both of these you get value from. Both of these are providing some kind of marketing "push" for some product.

How about your best friend who loves some certain kind of music and is always putting links to songs you don't care about in your Facebook feed?

Like I said, the purpose was just to mess with your head a bit. Apologies if I made it sound like some kind of evil overlord controlling armies of robots. That's not what I meant at all.

clistctrl• 15 years ago

I've been thinking about this for the past few days. It would seem captchas are an effective tool for screening bots etc out. But what happens once they pass the security line? (the body scanner didn't catch them before boarding the plane...?)

how do you identify a bot post in the wild? It seems to me that there is an equal possibility that a post could be from a bot as it could be from a real person... is there a way to use distributions, and some kind of artificial intelligence to search for fingerprints? Another curious question, how do you test it? Is there any accounts that we for sure have spotted as "probably an intelligence bot"

EDIT: I just got another thought, maybe it would be possible to setup a honey pot?

omarchowdhury• 15 years ago

I was thinking you could look for mouse movement to determine if it's a bot or a human. Bot writers don't have any need to code this feature in, if the site they're targeting isn't looking for it.

But when the site evolves, the spammer will evolve too.

adrianN2• 15 years ago

That would be quite expensive both for the server and the client. Besides, I certainly wouldn't use a site that tracks my mouse movement to determine whether I'm a human or not.

JonnieCache5• 15 years ago

>look for mouse movement to determine if it's a bot or a human

That trick didnt work in the days of AllAdvantage and its ilk and it wont work now :)

Ahh... memories...

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Alladvantage#...

jedberg3• 15 years ago

> is there a way to use distributions, and some kind of artificial intelligence to search for fingerprints?

Yes. :) I wish I could say more, but I don't want to give away the secrets to reddit's spam detection.

CytokineStorm• 15 years ago

Isn't reddit's code open source? https://github.com/reddit/reddit

Or are there parts (like the spam detection algorithm) that are kept secret?

knowsnothing6132• 15 years ago

yeah,

but you can program your bots to train the spam filters. Nothi8ng annoys the user base more than false-positive spam filtering.

jedberg3• 15 years ago

I have to say, as someone who has to deal with the same problem every day, I feel bad for the Digg folks. They are a good group of engineers, and spam is truly a hard problem -- much harder than most people realize.

634 Diggs, 17 comments, and 100 comment upvotes for Viagra

Related Stories