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Comment by bobosola | Hacker News Reader

I dunno... it feels like the same approach as those people who tell you gleeful stories of how they kept a phone spammer on a call for 45 minutes: "That'll teach 'em, ha ha!" Do these types of techniques really work? I’m not convinced.

Also, inserting hidden or misleading links is specifically a no-no for Google Search [0], who have this to say: We detect policy-violating practices both through automated systems and, as needed, human review that can result in a manual action. Sites that violate our policies may rank lower in results or not appear in results at all.

So you may well end up doing more damage to your own site than to the bots by using dodgy links in this manner.

[0]https://developers.google.com/search/docs/essentials/spam-po...

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>I dunno... it feels like the same approach as those people who tell you gleeful stories of how they kept a phone spammer on a call for 45 minutes: "That'll teach 'em, ha ha!" Do these types of techniques really work? I’m not convinced

If you are automating it, I don't see why not. Kitboga, a you-tuber kept scam callers in AI call-center loops tying up there resources so they cant use them on unsuspecting victims.[0]

That's a guerilla tactic, similar in warfare, when you steal resources from an enemy, you get stronger and they get weaker, its pretty effective.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDpo_o7dR8c

more and more scammers are automating their side as well so soon the loop will be just bots talking to bots

The dead phone theory?

More like dead communication theory:)

It would make a great pitch for a postmodern novel. In a post-ai world where everything is a remixed replica of the former world, humans don't communicate anymore as they were overloaded by noise and spam and can't distinguish between real humans and AIs.

Pretty easy. Get a paid number and have the phone scammers / marketers call that. I know a guy who made a decent side huzzle from this. They marketers slowly blocked his number tho, not sure if he still has this thing going on, as it was more a experiment.

Was he picking up the phone and telling them to call him back on the other number?

IIRC he did something like that, ask them to call back in "10 minutes after my meeting, and call my personal number, not my corporate phone, as it is tracked". On other occasions he filled in this number to some online forms that he "was asked to fill before continuing".

> Get a paid number

how? I'm interested

Its pretty easy. You can register a number with a phone company. Then you decide on the cost (eg. 5 bucks / minute). I recall he told me got like 100-150 usd/month from this. The longer he talked, the more they paid. He used to hang up after 10 or 15 minutes, but his "record" was close to one hour.

> gleeful stories of how they kept a phone spammer on a call for 45 minutes: "That'll teach 'em, ha ha!" Do these types of techniques really work? I’m not convinced.

It’s one of the best time investments I’ve ever made. They just don’t call me anymore.

I think they have two lists: the “do not call” list, and the “unprofitable to call” list. You want to be on the latter list.

From my experience, it's the opposite. The more you fuck with them the more they call. It's better not to answer. But I just can't help myself.

I'm guessing they might only know how long they had you on the phone per call and be oblivious to the fact you're intentionally wasting their time. I suppose you're still tying down a person who could be otherwise be genuinely scamming someone.

I got more calls at first too. I assume they were selling my number to the next scum in line. But then it just stopped.

Its been years though.

yes it work.

phone scammers have a very high personel cost, hence why some resort for human traffic.

if everyone picked up the phone and wasted a few seconds, it would be enough to make their whole enterprise worthless. but since most people who would not fail shutdown right away, they have the best ROI of any industry. they don't even pay the call for first seconds.

Also, inserting hidden or misleading links is specifically a no-no for Google Search [0]

Depending on your goals, this may be a pro or a con. I, personally, would like to see a return of "small web" human-centric communities. If there were tools that include anti-scraping, anti-Google (and other large search crawlers) as well as a small web search index for humans to find these sites, this idea becomes a real possibility.

It’s easy to opt out of being indexed by Google.

Exactly. Identifying crawlers like Google, bing aren't the issue. They obey robots.txt, and can easily be blocked by user agent checks. Non-identifying crawlers, which provide humanlike user agents, and which are usually distributed so get around ip-based rate limits, are the main ones that are challenging to deal with.

> it feels like the same approach as those people who tell you gleeful stories of how they kept a phone spammer on a call for 45 minutes: "That'll teach 'em, ha ha!" Do these types of techniques really work? I’m not convinced.

In 2000s there was some company in Russia selling English courses. It spammed so much, that people were really pissed off. To make long story short, the company disappeared from a public space when Golden Telecom joined the party of retaliatory "spam" calls and make computer to call the company using Golden Telecom modem pool.

So, yeah, you kinda can achieve something in this way, but to make sure you should lease a modem pool for that.

One would assume legit spiders obey robots.txt.

This, to me, is the strongest argument to offer these slop generators. It provides an incentive to follow the robots.txt.

Exactly. You disobey robots file => we'll make your crawl gain a net negative.

I really don't get it. Wouldn't you be wasting a lot of resources feeding the bots like this?

> do these types of techniques really work?

They have been proven to: https://www.anthropic.com/research/small-samples-poison

It might work for a very basic bot that doesn't understand how scraping to infinite depth is not very good idea. It won't be effective against anything minimally sophisticated.

Who TF cares about google? This is mostly for personal tech stuff (just the stuff AI steals for training). Id say its pretty welcome that it is not shown in google results.

> I’m not convinced.

Is this how low we've sunk - that even below taking a single personal anecdote and generalizing it to everything - now we're taking zero experience and dismissing things based on vibes?

I've seen lots of LLM-slop-lovers doing the same thing. Maybe it's a pattern.

We are way lower. At least this comment allows uncertainty.

The AI doomer literature is entirely from an armchair, with 100% certainty about the outcome, high confidence predictions about its timing. It’s literally fiction.

Honestly, I’m starting to not give a fuck about ranking on Google.

Google searches have become incredibly devalued for me in the age of LLMs. ChatGPT is pretty much my first and often only stop on a quest for some answers.

If you have a website, you must promote it via other ways that don’t involve Google.

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