Who's Behind All the 'Pussy in Bio' on X?

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

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.

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

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)

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

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

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.

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.

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