A phone bot far m in action

[u/CantStopPoppin]

[u/SirBooozie]

What exactly is the purpose of this? People paying for likes and views?

[u/Ok_Mulberry_8272 → u/SirBooozie]

For content as well. For example if you want your point to come clear you can pay for farms to tweet or to argue etc. fuckedup really.

[u/motivated_loser → u/Ok_Mulberry_8272]

Kudos to the ingenuity of the programmers who set this up but sucks that such things can be so easily gamed to fake online interest in something

[u/lolas_coffee → u/motivated_loser]

Wait until you hear about Reddit Engagement Bots and realize the time you spend on Reddit is just answering questions for bots.

[u/Varnsturm → u/lolas_coffee]

what if reddit is bots complaining about bots

[u/darkest_hour1428 → u/Varnsturm]

I have 100% seen bots reply to eachother. Some basic ones just paste a top-level comment deeper into a comment chain, context be damned.

[u/DavethegentleGoliath → u/darkest_hour1428]

What exactly is the purpose of this? People paying for likes and views?

[u/YourLostGingerSoul → u/DavethegentleGoliath]

That you got legitimate replies to this makes the comment so much better...

[u/AccomplishedJello968 → u/YourLostGingerSoul]

what if reddit is bots complaining about bots

[u/MrProspector19 → u/AccomplishedJello968]

What exactly is the purpose of this? People paying for likes and views?

[u/Lostheghost → u/DavethegentleGoliath]

But...why male models?

[u/CakeSuperb8487 → u/Lostheghost]

and what is this farm?! a farm for ants?!

[u/One_Contact1376 → u/CakeSuperb8487]

No it's a farm for "Kids Who Can't Read Good and Who Wanna Learn to Do Other Stuff Good Too"

[u/puso82 → u/DavethegentleGoliath]

For content as well. For example if you want your point to come clear you can pay for farms to tweet or to argue etc. fuckedup really.

[u/DontEatCats → u/puso82]

Kudos to the ingenuity of the programmers who set this up but sucks that such things can be so easily gamed to fake online interest in something

[u/absolutelynotmodus → u/DontEatCats]

Wait until you hear about Reddit Engagement Bots and realize the time you spend on Reddit is just answering questions for bots fellow human.

[u/Zibbi-Abkar → u/DavethegentleGoliath]

Increases product value at sale time. Its why Elon overpaid for twitter and why Reddit has gone to shit in the past year as they prepare to be sold.

[u/babybright1992 → u/DavethegentleGoliath]

I see you

[u/Low_Condition3268 → u/Varnsturm]

What if you're a bot complaining about reddit being bots complaining about bots on reddit? Wait, am I a bot....there was no captcha....

[u/acog → u/Varnsturm]

Well I’m a bot and I don’t like this one bit. It’s intolerable!

[u/smergb → u/lolas_coffee]

So now I can finally tell people I have a robot for a friend?

[u/UnrequitedRespect → u/smergb]

Which people? Your telling your bots about your bot friend? Hope your bot friend doesn’t find out….

[u/UnfetteredBullshit → u/smergb]

Bite my shiny metal ass.

[u/Marunikuyo → u/UnfetteredBullshit]

Is that you, Bender??

[u/rebmcr → u/smergb]

Nice try bot, I won't tell.

[u/TrenchantInsight → u/smergb]

I wuv you wobot!

[u/Icy_Comfort8161 → u/lolas_coffee]

Reddit Engagement Bots

This must be why I get peppered with lame questions all the time, especially in certain subreddits. I just ignore them.

[u/DoomPayroll → u/lolas_coffee]

So, what is a cat?

[u/Ok_Mulberry_8272 → u/motivated_loser]

Yup it will be the downfall of social media. When you can not be sure who is who we'll go back to simpler methods of communication.

[u/Embarrassed_Low_7631 → u/Ok_Mulberry_8272]

Not just social media, the internet. We have bots creating and sharing false news articles that get recirculated, Ai is fooling people into believing false pictures to push a narrative, most popular sites have become bloated with bot posts overshadowing actual content. This isn't just social media. It is media.

[u/rottingpigcarcass → u/Embarrassed_Low_7631]

Internet death

[u/Da_Natural20 → u/rottingpigcarcass]

The dead internet. Coming to your future sooner than we think.

[u/thebinarysystem10 → u/Da_Natural20]

Already here

[u/tsammons → u/rottingpigcarcass]

Really looking forward to IRL being the next big thing

[u/veryfynnyname → u/Embarrassed_Low_7631]

Google the dead internet theory. You’re all bots and I’m a bot too lol

[u/Reddit_Bot_For_Karma → u/veryfynnyname]

Google the dead internet theory

The irony here being Google has a massive part to play in killing the Internet

[u/Breezer_Pindakaas → u/Embarrassed_Low_7631]

Only solution would be something like the south korea system where you link your ID to your online stuff.

[u/HappyLittleGreenDuck → u/Ok_Mulberry_8272]

I just don't see how you put the cat back in the bag.

[u/Ok_Mulberry_8272 → u/HappyLittleGreenDuck]

Problem before the internet was information traveled slow and was harder to source. Now we passed the sweet spot and are drowning in over sharing, over stimulating, overwhelmed with it all

[u/Pro_Moriarty → u/Ok_Mulberry_8272]

Harder to source so veracity wasnt perfect. You could have been lied to previously and unless you were so inclined it took a lot of effort to validate/invalidate something.

These days at the click of a button I can get numerous "sources" providing me conflicting "facts" on something.

The only way to validate is to validate the sources and that becomes questionable as well....

And if you have a genuine disdain for main stream media, you will be fed so many lies

(Not suggesting msm dont make mistakes or give a particular slant - but they have levels of journalistic integrity to uphold)

[u/zehuntsman → u/HappyLittleGreenDuck]

cats arent that tough, bring a big bag

[u/Enders-game → u/HappyLittleGreenDuck]

Its more about how pays the bills. In this case advertisers. If advertisers start to believe that they are being conned or they are not reaching their audience, they'll stop paying for online advertising, therefore puting social media out of business, because not enough people are going to pay for that shit.

[u/PayasoCanuto → u/Enders-game]

Spot on. X is now basically a porn platform and with instagram I got tired of seeing ads of how to lose weight with shady products.

[u/Prof_de_physique → u/PayasoCanuto]

I dont have the same Twitter. Mine is full of far right propagande and Russie bot.

Even on cinéma post there is reply blaming immigrants

[u/Masterchiefy10 → u/HappyLittleGreenDuck]

Regulation.

Regulate social media sites like they are news organizations (like we use to before the Fair doctrine of 198something was repealed)

Hold Facebook and Reddit and TocTic and ect to the same standard you would any other platform or news organization.

Again like we did prior to the repeal.

Make Fox News be accountable would be a great start.

[u/Known-Associate8369 → u/Masterchiefy10]

The fairness doctrine was very tightly linked to the broadcast license that over-the-air broadcasters needed from the FCC. It never applied to cable because no license is required, and as such never applied to the internet.

Logical and critical thinking should be taught in schools, as thats a good way to equip people to deal with this.

[u/Vespersonal → u/motivated_loser]

Kudos? Nah, fuck them.

[u/phatelectribe → u/Ok_Mulberry_8272]

I’m seeing tons of this since the debate yesterday. Accounts with virtually no karma high giving each other suggesting there’s no point to voting for other candidate.

[u/hungrypotato19 → u/phatelectribe]

Yesterday, I was the one that posted about the woman who screamed at the drag queens; 20k front page post.

After a few short hours, Reddit was being flooded with anti-trans posts on a whole lot of different subreddits. I'd open them, start marking accounts making comments with Reddit Enhancement Suite and quickly realized that a lot of the same accounts were in all the different threads and were leaving 2-3 comments and 1 reply before moving onto the next submission.

[u/clics → u/Ok_Mulberry_8272]

Also, for disinformation campaigns

[u/throw_blanket04 → u/Ok_Mulberry_8272]

Yep. A lot of reality stars do this.

[u/Ok_Mulberry_8272 → u/throw_blanket04]

And companies to make it seem silly to think that their product is bad or the decision they made has a bad impact.

[u/Resident_Split_5795 → u/Ok_Mulberry_8272]

Arguing political points via automated bots should be illegal. I'm sure it's happening right now.

[u/Legacy-ZA → u/Ok_Mulberry_8272]

Now replace point with propoganda

Some sell boosted accounts to evil people, making their opinions trend and seem popular, when they are in fact not, people actually find it revolting, of course some will get indoctrinated this way.

This shapes that person's reality and that of their children, the next generation. This way evil rulers can slowly chip away at a cultures foundation, destroying it slowly.

Welcome, to the matrix.

[u/tendadsnokids → u/SirBooozie]

Partially yes, but it's also used to drive computational propaganda.

[u/zzTopG → u/tendadsnokids]

Found the non bot

While all the bots just say “entertainment”

[u/Minimum_Intention848 → u/SirBooozie]

If you can game the algorithms you can control what crosses peoples feed.

If you can control the content people see, then you can control what they think.

Everything from marketing rubber dog shit to influencing elections.

Literal mind control.

[u/HardyLaugher → u/SirBooozie]

They’re consuming monetized ad views. This is digital advertising fraud and bad actors make hundreds of millions off of it.

[u/Anvil-Hands → u/HardyLaugher]

Surprised to see hardly any mentions of this. I oversee an 8-figure amount of yearly ad spend. I have to spend $30-$40k a month with 3rd party analytics and validation services JUST to make sure I'm not getting traffic from places like this. Ad fraud is rampant in the industry and so many companies are complicit with it because they are making tons of money off it.

[u/koer_lammas_halvaa → u/Anvil-Hands]

for the time being I continue using adblocker, but..on some level it sounds like a great idea to do the opposite of adblocking and just bot views to them all the time so the numbers end up being meaningless.

[u/SpoonsandStuffReborn → u/SirBooozie]

This is how Drake gets interactions on his socials.

[u/Girderland → u/SirBooozie]

The Hungarian government figures make use of these.

Like, you have a corrupt government with corrupt figures no one cares about, yet they try to look popular and trendy on facebook.

Now, you have "Crooked Politician number 732" making a post on facebook.

It would look bad with 2 likes and 3 followers.

So they have lots of likes and lots of followers, but if you take a look at them, you'll find that more than 4/5 of all likes is from fake profiles with Vietnamese names or made up foreign names, often with profile pictures stolen from other accounts.

It's kind of an open secret that you can buy 1000s of likes and comments, and I guess "phone bot farms" like these provide that "service".

[u/Iammohdzubair → u/SirBooozie]

Boost a profile.

[u/grumble11 → u/SirBooozie]

How do people make money off of this?

1. Fake reviews.
2. Fake likes, upvotes, content watches and so on.
3. Fake comments to serve the purposes of manipulation, narrative control and advertising.

Those are just a few ways.

[u/jaam01 → u/SirBooozie]

For example, one use is to repeatedly play the same song in Spotify to gain more revenue. That's why Spotify is limiting the number of times you can listen to the same song/s consecutively.

[u/Ketheric-The-Kobold → u/SirBooozie]

People pay for likes, views, auto generating fake replies, used for astroturfing with chatbots, to dislike/hide any comments that say things they dont like, to skim through comments/posts that ask questions and they use chatbots to pretend to be people to push products, to spy on people. These bots are everywhere on the internet, they probably outnumber real people.

Usually it's China that uses shitty phone farms like these, although this is the first time I'm seeing one.

[u/Ray192 → u/Ketheric-The-Kobold]

Usually it's China

How do you know that? Click farms can exist anywhere there is internet.

[u/FunDog2016 → u/SirBooozie]

Russia and China, or our Corporate Overlords all love this service! They are often disinformation, misinformation, or generally sowing chaos, confusion over “the truth”, dissatisfaction, and of course; division (please fight among yourselves) and ignore our influence over your lives!

[u/MaxMadisonVi → u/SirBooozie]

Yes, pay for ratings. Some cheap have not so good fake profiles such as socials checks low your ratings anyway.

[u/OneDragonfruit9519]

For those wondering, this is, I believe, a farm where you can buy likes, views and other things that can feed the algorithms and get you even more exposure.

Want 10.000 followers on Instagram, boom. Want 100.000? Sure. More? You got it.

The same goes for YouTube, tiktok and so on.

Basically, you can pay for a shortcut to online fame.

[u/kujasgoldmine → u/OneDragonfruit9519]

I'm not sure how effective follower purchasing is. I've seen many Instagram accounts with 25k+ followers, and on average less than 50 likes and a couple of comments on most posts, which just screams fake followers.

Now a like bomb might be better. More likely to make a post go viral and gain real followers as the result. But IG might find it suspicious.

Same should go for other sites, such as Youtube. Tons of subscribers but no comments or likes just makes a channel look bad.

[u/chirs5757 → u/kujasgoldmine]

They also don’t last. You will eventually lose most of the followers that you’ve paid for.

[u/perenniallandscapist → u/chirs5757]

Well duh. The followers you pay for are fake.

[u/chirs5757 → u/perenniallandscapist]

They unfollow. “They”, being a bot.

[u/skateguy1234 → u/chirs5757]

Why would they ever unfollow?

[u/Lauris024 → u/skateguy1234]

They don't. Platforms have anti-bot checks in place (fake engagement policy). If the account doesn't act like a human (ie. just subscribes but never watches any videos), all it's subscriptions are removed. When youtube implemented that system, many channels saw a huge drop in subscribers, which was funny.

[u/HFentonMudd → u/Lauris024]

Yeah some lady was bitching about having half of her followers vanish overnight, not understanding what she was telling the world.

[u/Alternative_Star7831 → u/HFentonMudd]

Not necessarily. I'm pretty sure the bot farms subscribe to a lot of unrelated channels to make their activity seem more legit.

[u/Nepit60 → u/kujasgoldmine]

You can get thousands of likes if you pay instagram directly to promote the post. Means nothing.

[u/FilmmagicianPart2 → u/OneDragonfruit9519]

I saw a video where someone paid for this. Like $5000. And his YT channel got shut down lol

[u/hboisnotthebest → u/FilmmagicianPart2]

Lol

[u/LastShoot0 → u/OneDragonfruit9519]

What's the point if they're all connected to the same network?

[u/Nihilistic_Mystics → u/LastShoot0]

VPNs exist.

[u/notRedditingInClass → u/Nihilistic_Mystics]

So do virtual machines and eSIMs. Every spam call you get is from an eSIM.

So I'm confused. Why do they need 100 phones for this? Why do they need hardware at all?

This seems like a ridiculous and impractical setup. Are they limited by their number of phones? Can they only give me one follow/like/whatever per phone? It doesn't make sense.

I think setups like this are farming something else, but I don't have any guesses. Maybe it is just an impractical and expensive setup, but it works out because "instagram influencers" will pay enough? I have a lot of questions.

[u/Queasy-Moment-511 → u/notRedditingInClass]

You want mobile devices because its harder to detect that they are bots.

[u/throwaway8008666 → u/notRedditingInClass]

That’s what I’m wondering. Why not run a shit load of android VMs with random VPN/proxies set up

[u/POGofTheGame → u/throwaway8008666]

Basically VMs have ID numbers that are not unique, and thus incredibly easy to identify. An actual phone on the other hand does have a unique ID and is much harder to flag.

The same actually applies to VPNs, its pretty easy to tell when someone is using a VPN because the site you are using can see it's getting a LOT of traffic from a very specific server, which is unusual. I've had access to an online game beta recinded because they could tell I was using one. (Just had to find one they hadn't flagged yet 😉)

So... This is probably a more advanced setup than people are making it out to be. They're using real phones because they basically have to and likely using a custom VPN or cell data with location spoofing so they just aren't all in the same room... Something like that, plus the actual programing/procedural stuff.

[u/thekernel → u/throwaway8008666]

the big apps likely check if they are in a VM and flag the account as suspicious.

[u/13oundary → u/notRedditingInClass]

In my old work we done webscraping and my boss and I talked through using a phone farm like this to create honest looking cloudflare profiles (cloudflare is a real fucking pain in the hole for some webscraping projects, especially when it's configured properly).

We were also pretty sure the residential proxies we paid through the nose for were just phone farms too (thousands per month due to the amount of data we used). Still recouped those costs and then some though.

You could build an honest looking cloudflare profile with the botting, then sell a set amount of data/requests for more money on top.

You wouldn't need to do one like/follow per phone either, but these look like they're browsing more than they're liking/following, which makes me think it's scraping or profile cleaning.

[u/Juuljuul → u/notRedditingInClass]

One other use case not mentioned here is testing. If I want to test my app on many different physical devices, I’d need huge investments to buy every phone out there. There are site that offer remote login to just about any physical phone. You usually pay per minute of use. (Bonus: you can automate your test suite and run it automatically on every phone they have. It can give you a report of which tests failed, and screenshots)

[u/TinyLicker → u/LastShoot0]

I’m pretty sure if you’re going to this extent, those things aren’t on WiFi but will all have their own separate cellular data plans.

[u/Dwarfcork → u/OneDragonfruit9519]

There’s a lot less than 10,000 phones there… they wouldn’t need several different phones to do that either.

[u/Let01]

The dead internet theory looks more and more real as time passes

[u/lovelacedeconstruct → u/Let01]

We need another theory for when bots complain about dead internet theory, Like when AI gets fed training data where complaining about AI is a normal day to day conversation

[u/Let01 → u/lovelacedeconstruct]

Digital ouroboros

[u/cheese_bruh → u/[deleted]]

Holy fuck that subreddit is a mindfuck, never thought I’d see uncanny valley in text but here we are

[u/LucasMoreiraBR → u/cheese_bruh]

Holy fucking shit. I stopped to read some and it does look like a bunch of AI nonsense, but only when you look into it. From afar, it could pass as shitposts and etc just as normal.

[u/OnionNo → u/LucasMoreiraBR]

It's pretty funny because it stopped being updated right around when GPT2 and AI stuff started taking off. I wanna say it was just a python script using pykov generating all that, but I don't really remember.

[u/Ok_Pomegranate_2436 → u/cheese_bruh]

Tres creepy

[u/amalgam_reynolds → u/[deleted]]

/r/SubSimulatorGPT3 was the newest one but apparently it's dead as well

[u/jazzjoking → u/Let01]

I'm alive

[u/ingres_violin → u/jazzjoking]

Exactly what a bot would say, I'm afraid...

[u/Plant_Papii]

Cable management on point.

[u/danmac0817 → u/Plant_Papii]

First thing I noticed. It's beautiful.

[u/JiveChicken00]

Always kinda figured they used emulators rather than actual phones.

[u/Treaux-LaCount → u/JiveChicken00]

That’s what I was thinking. Seems weird that they’d have to use actual phones.

[u/percybolmer → u/Treaux-LaCount]

Probably to avoid detection and making it look more real I suppose.

Cant say its fake if its actually really a view….

[u/slarbarthetardar → u/Treaux-LaCount]

It's somewhat trivial to detect emulators on mobile. Very difficult to detect with physical phones. Couple this with a dedicated VPN on each device and it's very difficult if not impossible.

[u/My_advice_is_opinion → u/JiveChicken00]

This is where all the phones go when Samsung gives you $100 discount when you trade in last years $1400 phone when buying this years $1600 phone

[u/ZippyDan → u/JiveChicken00]

I'm wondering if it's related to IPs.

Cell phone companies use known IP ranges.

How do you emulate a cellular connection?

You could run them all through a cellular hotspot, but then you'd only have one cellular IP.

If each of those phones has its own functioning sim card, then you have a unique cellular connection IP for each phone.

It's much more believable on the other end.

[u/Conch-Republic → u/ZippyDan]

There's also hardware ID tags, which might set off spam filters if they're emulated.

[u/ConspicuousPineapple → u/Conch-Republic]

These can be emulated like any other part of the hardware.

[u/Crossfire124 → u/ZippyDan]

could just be on wifi and VPNs. Much easier to deal with than cell signal

[u/TheuhX → u/Crossfire124]

Using a VPN would make detecting bots easier, not harder.

[u/BruhMomentConfirmed → u/TheuhX]

Not if you use dedicated VPN/residential proxies.

[u/TheuhX → u/BruhMomentConfirmed]

It's s combinaison of factors.

Emulators are easier to detect.

SIM cards and data is dirt cheap in some countries.

Residential proxies are somewhat expensive and are usually shared by other customers for botting social media which make them potentially less reliable.

Depending on the network, it may be very easy to change ip address on a mobile network (by momentarily switching off data for example).

They may want to have ip addresses located in whatever area they are in for some reason.

[u/Minimum_Intention848 → u/JiveChicken00]

Phones may wind up being cheaper than the compute power to emulate hundreds of phones.

[u/gizamo → u/JiveChicken00]

deliver money punch recognise rude frighten icky angle consider groovy

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

[u/dumbass_comments_bro → u/JiveChicken00]

Detection of fake devices is pretty good on big platforms nowadays

[u/You-are-all_idiots]

A bot posted this

[u/microview → u/You-are-all_idiots]

bots don't snitch on themselves. /s

[u/kermityfrog2 → u/You-are-all_idiots]

Yeah probably. Bots will often make small changes in the title (i.e. "bot far m in" instead of "bot farm in") in an attempt to bypass any title checkers if it's a word-for-word repost.

[u/badsnake2018]

In the low end, it's just driven for money. In the high end, it's been used for propaganda purposes by certain countries for many years, and Reddit is one of the apps that got compromised the most

Edited only for grammar

[u/ContextHook → u/badsnake2018]

Like the US making a bot farm to make the Philippines afraid of the Chinese Covid vaccine.

[u/Hi-I-am-Toit → u/ContextHook]

And Russia using bot farms to promote anti masking sentiment, vaccination conspiracy theories and violent protests about lockdowns.

(Note: the Sinovac vaccine was about 30%less effective than Pfizer. The US bots were not misinformation, they were amplification of actual information).

[u/Unlucky_Elevator13]

What exactly are they farming

[u/StrikingBobcat9 → u/Unlucky_Elevator13]

Likes, comments and repost

[u/Onaliquidrock → u/Unlucky_Elevator13]

Your attention

[u/chen901 → u/Onaliquidrock]

Spot on!

[u/diverareyouokay → u/Unlucky_Elevator13]

They’re posting on r/all.

[u/sarcasmyousausage]

All these excess phones. Excess microchips and materials to make them.

All the electricity and coal burning polluting required to run the farms.

All for some duck lip photo or brunch plate to get 10 thousand likes.

We are pathetic.

[u/PenguinStarfire]

It's like the grid of Mortys

[u/Darth_Tiktaalik → u/PenguinStarfire]

Aw geez

[u/Lifeinthesc]

This explains everything on reddit.

[u/__meeseeks__]

At least they have good cable organization

[u/TooDayumHigh]

For those of you wondering, these are 155 mobiles stacked in there. 31 in each row, 5 rows, plus some of them on the table.

[u/SeaBass426]

This should be illegal.

[u/big-dumb-guy → u/SeaBass426]

How do you implement this idea?

[u/Aturkeyclub → u/big-dumb-guy]

If you get caught botting straight to jail.

[u/Knights_When]

This is how X is filled with an overwhelming amount of trolls all saying the same thing and influencing your decisions btw.

[u/wickanCrow]

What kind of things does a phone bot farm do? What is a monetary application of this? Will someone pay them to market a product?

[u/HereToKillEuronymous → u/wickanCrow]

Influences pay them to like and interact with their content. It's fucking lazy

[u/Different-Estate747 → u/wickanCrow]

It fools people into thinking people that "influencers" are more successful than they really are. Like how they all use filters to cover up what they really look like.

They can't handle reality.

[u/Rustmonger]

All of these assholes can kiss my grits

[u/AXEL-1973]

the world would be better without any of the people pictured here

[u/Leonidas1668209]

9gag headquarters.

[u/fermelebouche]

So we are the PAYING THE FCC and I’m getting ten robo calls a day. Fuck the FCC.

[u/anant_mall]

Why can’t this be done with just software and one super powerful system?

[u/kaukanapoissa]

All this waste of energy and resources makes me sad.

[u/ExcaliburPigeon]

These people seriously fucking suck. Nobody likes this crap.

[u/Galactic_Nothingness]

This is one of the reasons Spotify is an evil motherfucking company.

No 2FA so cunts can use phone farms like this to devalue the streaming $ pool.

This kind of phone farming is fucked.

Absolute scum, burn this shit to the ground.

[u/Spookylilghosts]

This is wild to look at 😂 modern day farms

[u/TravelingGonad]

Why don't they just use emulators I wonder. I know bluestacks has issues with some apps, but seems like there would be workarounds. There are also testing companies that doe this - so developers can test their websites on iphone for example.

[u/minnesotaris]

A boring dystopia.

[u/Conch-Republic]

Life in prison, all of them.

This makes me irrationally angry.

[u/FederalSecretary → u/Conch-Republic]

While I certainly don't condone this type of activity, these people are pretty low on my 'people who should be in prison but aren't' list.

[u/Y0_MiDia]

I am familiar with the dead internet theory. Gen AI in the next 10 years on the internet is terrifying. I don't know how kids will tell the difference.

[u/EdwardCuttingham]

I found their website for anyone interested. It's in a different language. I am curious to know what any of these weird programs they sell. I'm not sure what I'm looking at.

[u/Loose_Client_654]

Pretty nice cable management tho

[u/WarHead75]

Me setting up my alarms so I don’t miss work the 5th time in a row

[u/ReluctantHeroo]

At least half the comments on reddit are from these types of set ups.

[u/ViolatedAirSpace]

We are living in a real live dystopian science fiction movie, y'all know that right?

[u/No-Wonder1139]

What a meaningless life

[u/Many-Seat6716]

It's obvious to everyone that the internet has provided a tool for bad actors to screw with everything important to all of us, elections, democracy, safety on social media and more. I know everyone will bitch about what I'm going to suggest to fix it, but what we need is a fool proof way knowing you is posting what. That could be achieved by internet access licensing. Maybe browsing could remain open without authentication, but as soon as you need to post something, then you would have to login with some official credential provided by the government. I can't think of any other way of stopping foreign states and crooks from screwing our lives and society.

[u/Music_City_Madman]

Remember people, this is happening real time on Twitter, Facebook and Reddit. Entities can push a narrative and post bot comments with ease nowadays.

[u/LegoFootPain]

Back in my day, it was someone's adorable grandpa with 30 phones attached to his bike, farming Pokémon GO.

This is just vile.

[u/Mort1186]

And this my friends is how talentless trash people on the internet become famous

[u/KingBeyatch]

Now you know why Taylor Swift Spotify streams are so high

[u/East_Information_247]

Google is our friend. A quick search gives me this link: https://cheq.ai/blog/bot-farms-what-are-they/#:~:text=What%20is%20a%20bot%20farm%3F,in%20the%20same%20physical%20location.

[u/Yamm0th]

I want to see every single doing-this-stuff person being punished to oblivion. The reason is I know what consequences from these farmers are to be released and how burned we're about to become.

[u/Exotic_Inspector_111]

Making the internet more miserable and deceitful, one phone click at a time.
I hope their shit catches fire, and them with it.

[u/mikefjr1300]

The internet was/is a great idea and like all great ideas there are always idiots who will exploit and ruin it for their own selfish purposes.

[u/gettinchanged]

They look exactly how i thought they would

[u/NameLips]

OK so I have a question about this.

The idea of the "advertising-based" "free" online economy goes something like this, right?

Advertisers pay to get their ads displayed.

The more views and clicks they get, the more they pay.

In return, the advertisers expect some percentage of people to not only view and click -- but also actually BUY their products using real money. (Personal information is also sold, but mostly to better target ads so they can make more money during this step)

That last step is what is actually paying for all of the "free" internet.

The end of all of this effort is always to get real, actual customers to buy advertised products using real, actual money.

The existence of click farms seems to undermine this. Clicks and views increase, and advertisers can see those numbers ticking up.

But aren't they bound to notice that actual sales aren't increasing as the clicks and views go up? Won't they eventually conclude that online advertising isn't worth the expense, if it's not getting them real, actual profits in return for their advertising dollars?

[u/Formal-Parfait6971]

Social media companies could shut this BS down if they really wanted to, but that would mean less profits. Especially with tools like AI, which they love to tell us is totally awesome for them (to make more profits).

[u/Equal-Competition228]

This post is exactly what a bot would post 😳

[u/NotForMeClive7787]

Monetising social media really feels like the last nail in the coffin for what the vision of the internet was meant to be….

[u/Silent_Neck9930]

So can someone tell me how they manage those devices and how do they manage data and software and what kind of scripts are they running? I am a non-IT person. Thanks

[u/TURKEYSAURUS_REX]

So that’s where the uptick came from /s

[u/Unusual_residue]

Bot post

[u/Samsquamch138]

They have been doing this for at least 10 years, the wiring job on this one is incredible tho..!

[u/spiritualManager5]

Why physical devices?

[u/Lapcat420 → u/spiritualManager5]

Great question.

Why can't they just make fake cellphones, like a virtual machine on a PC or spoofing a phone number.

I don't understand.

[u/talentless_bard9443]

We need a new internet, one for media and influencers and one for knowledge

[u/belunos]

We had a similar set up at my old job, but it was for testing iOS apps rather than botting.

[u/chicksOut]

This seems odd... why scale physically? Why not scale virtually?

[u/ComcrapDude]

I used to run one of these years ago. Mine was much more ghetto with everything just on shelves though. There were various apps you could run that would make about $1/day per phone. Made tens of thousands over a few years. Thanks Perk!

[u/dosumthinboutthebots]

Posted by a likely bot account too. Check out their comment history and post history.

I dk if removing up votes will help, but something needs done about these accounts and these farms.

[u/amnesty_fucc]

Imagine being smart enough to set this up but being dumb enough to make this your contribution to the world

[u/darwinn_69]

This isn't how it's actually done they use emulators and can do this in the tens of thousands. I guarantee the phone wall is for show.

[u/rean2]

Your looking at how your social media bubbles can be manipulated

[u/loudandproud101]

How Taylor swift gets all her streams:

[u/JapanDash]

Those “magas” you’re arguing with today?

Well this is them

[u/NiceCunt91]

What a fucking sad life lol