Lots and lots of disabled people, even with disability income. The affordable housing wait list in some major cities is several years.
Owner and writer of CovertWiki.org. It’s basically a wannabe spy handbook in wiki format. Feel free to leave a bookmark until more content is released, or message me on Discord under the same username to become a contributor.
Lots and lots of disabled people, even with disability income. The affordable housing wait list in some major cities is several years.
FreeBSD went from 0.01% to 0% last month. 🪦
I could sure use some of that money to buy the next iPhone. Just imagine what my friends would think if I didn’t.
I didn’t read very far up into the thread. Sorry.
Automated filters will just drive determined botters to play the system and perfect their craft until they can no longer be automatically identified, in my opinion. I’m more of the stance that accounts should be reviewed manually so that a leap into convincing bot accounts will need to be much more dramatic, and therefore difficult. If it’s done the hard way from the start with staff who know how to identify these accounts, it may keep it from growing into an issue to begin with.
Any threshold to be automatically flagged for review should be relatively low, but the process should also be quick and efficient. Adding more metrics to the flagging process only means botters will have a narrower gaze to avoid. Once they start crunching the numbers and streamline mimicking real user accounts it’s game over.
Signup safeguards will never be enough because the people who create these accounts have demonstrated that they are more than willing to do that dirty work themselves.
Let’s look at the anatomy of the average Reddit bot account:
Rapid points acquisition. These are usually new accounts, but it doesn’t have to be. These posts and comments are often done manually by the seller if the account is being sold at a significant premium.
A sudden shift in contribution style, usually preceded by a gap in activity. The account has now been fully matured to the desired amount of points, and is pending sale or set aside to be “aged”. If the seller hasn’t loaded on any points, the account is much cheaper but the activity gap still exists.
My solution? Implement a weighted visual timeline for a user’s points and posts to make it easier for admins to single out accounts that have already been found to be acting suspiciously. There are other types of malicious accounts that can be troublesome such as self-run engagement farms which express consistent front page contributions featuring their own political or whatever lean, but the type first described is a major player in Reddit’s current shitshow and is much easier to identify.
Most important is moderator and admin willingness to act. Many subreddit moderators on Reddit already know their subreddit has a bot problem but choose to do nothing because it drives traffic. Others are just burnt out and rarely even lift a finger to answer modmail, doing the bare minimum to keep their subreddit from being banned.
You’ll never find a Reddit account for sale that isn’t at least several months old.
A lot, actually. Tons of money is being poured into raising up popular propagandists because it works. Russia was caught doing it just recently.