Hacker News Reader

Comment by cramcgrab | Hacker News Reader

Most viral things are driven, at least initially, by bots or click farms. Also, fake promotions from websites to artificially amplify posts or stories. View counts on a video or post can easily be manipulated.

View on HN

You can buy server racks for under $200 from China that are made for holding like 20 Android motherboards. Get 50 of those and some centralised management software to interact with all of them on one big screen and you have potentially 1000 unique users that will be really hard to distinguish from bots using normal techniques. That's more than enough to jump-start a viral moment on many social media platforms. And if you hire 5 guys to post full time, you can completely steer the discussion on individual channels like facebook groups, instagram posts or reddit/HN threads.

Yep. There was a paper a few years ago that looked at how Russian bots spread disinformation. Basically the bots hype the disinformation internally amongst themselves until it lands on a real persons feed. By that point it looks real because of all of the engagement. From there, real human emotion and the engagement algorithms take over.

What I don't understand about bot farms is how they don't get IP banned.

If you do buy such a rack, how do people in practice get a rack full of devices to look like they're coming from valid ips that aren't in a VPN or cloud provider's ip range?

IP banning is way more difficult in practice than most people realise due to NAT. How do you distinguish a bot farm that is heavily posting on some trendy topic from a school full of highly engaged kids? They'll both have a ton of traffic coming from a single IP as far as your server is concerned. And if any IP ever does get flagged (which only makes sense for static ones anyways), it is trivial to move to a new one.

Mobile phones end up sharing an external IP address with may other (real human) mobile phones on the same cellular network.

Residential proxies and other such techniques, I imagine.

Most (all?) commercial social networks sell ads. Outrage-farm bots drive activity in two ways: the bot traffic itself and human response to the outrage bait.

I think the sad truth is the bots are good for business.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com