this post was submitted on 25 May 2025
47 points (94.3% liked)

Technology

39116 readers
338 users here now

A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.

Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.

Subcommunities on Beehaw:


This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
 

I want to share some thoughts that I had recently about YouTube spam comments. We all know these early bots in the YouTube comment section, with those "misleading" profile pictures and obvious bot like comments. Those comments are often either random about any topic or copied from other users.

OK, why am I telling you that? Well, I think these bots are there to be recognized as bots. Their job is to be seen as a bot and be deleted and ignored. In that case everyone feels safe, thinking all bots are now deleted. But in reality there are more sophisticated bots under us. So the easy bots job is to get delete and basically mislead us, so we don't think that any is left, because they are deleted.

What do you think? Sounds plausible, doesn't it? Or do I have paranoia? :D

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] IncognitoMosquito@beehaw.org 13 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Obvious scams are obvious on purpose, but not for the reason you're suggesting. They don't want to waste actual manpower on anyone smart enough to recognize a scam. So they make the scam obvious, and they know that anyone that does respond to it is in that small percentage of clueless or gullible people that the scam might actually succeed on. They're not trying to play 4D chess, they're trying to find the people that can only play 1D checkers.

[–] thingsiplay@beehaw.org 5 points 2 weeks ago

Oh, I finally get this argumentation! I've read it before couple of times (also in the comment section of this topic here), but it didn't make sense. But now it clicked. I can definitely see why they keep it simple and straightforward now. And yes, it makes more sense than my theory.