Someone Has Filmed Inside a 'Click Farm' and It's Weird AF | Hacker News Reader

Someone Has Filmed Inside a 'Click Farm' and It's Weird AF

ladbible.com

17 pointsselmat9 comments

I was surprised to see this is done with real hardware. I had expected VMs, or faking the user agent, or even reverse engineering the http requests and replaying them. Surely the economics is far better than buying 10s of thousands of phones. I guess theres a reason I haven't thought of.

Detecting a real phone must be harder than a vm. If the price for the likes is right, the cost of the phone is inconsequential to the cost of getting your click farm and its clicks banned.

Maybe. They're a fixed one time cost though, and I imagine that it's much easier to avoid being detected if you're running on your own hardware as opposed to VMs.

My best guess is there needs to be a real SIM at the very least, so that the requests come from legitimately different and randomly distributed IPs.

So you need a system that can virtualize all that, but still go through separate SIMs. The cost of developing something like this probably doesn't outweigh the "ease" of just faking it with real phones.

(On top of this I have my doubts about how much "tens of thousands of phones" costs for someone who doesn't care about grey areas)

Here's Apple's version: https://techcrunch.com/2016/07/13/facebook-lifts-the-veil-on...

For testing apps :)

I wonder why likes, stars, retweets and similar counters are not weighted by a reputation in a user visible way. For the user a tweet with 1000 botnet retweets looks exactly like a tweet with 1000 retweets by experts in a given subject.

Someone recycled garbage content with a clickbait title and it's Weird AF

I hope 'AF' doesn't become a journalistic trend.

It seems trends bubble up from clickbait groups and then become adopted by actual journalists lately.

Here's hoping this isn't one of the ones to become popular.

Huh i balked at that scene from silicon valley, thinking "surely this is all virtualized". But look at this! Too weird.

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