@StarProphet @icedquinn @fish @phnt @sampler @strypey @silverpill @light @Mammal > Gab used to have a bot account called “jsheistydiety” that posts hi-res screenshots of low res boomer memes at multiple times per minute.
So, that's something I saw; I suspected that the Gab Trends was gamed so I did some analysis but it was really difficult to get some sort of clean view of Gab Trends (clickwrapping plus downtime plus their shit was difficult for both humans and bots to read). But I found this group of accounts that would all post the same set of Pepes and then randomly they would post the same link as all the others did, and then that link would show up on Gab Trends.
There was some recipe bot that would shit recipes scraped from recipe sites and the guy was claiming to be a Vietnam War sniper (his account was something like "sniperss"), right, a member of a unit that didn't exist during the Vietnam War, and now he's a "hotel chef" and he purported to be posting his own recipes but he wasn't even using the same units consistently; his top posts were all spelled and punctuated properly but his replies were all weird shit definitely not written by an American and he'd end them with "thank you,,david", weird shit. So I noticed a lot of accounts had that pattern, their top-level posts were
The most reliable indicator was that the bots would engage in some really easy-to-analyze behavior: they'd post uniformly around the clock (humans sleep), the overwhelming majority of their activities would be posts/reposts. That is, very few likes and very few replies to people that didn't tag them, very few follow/unfollow/block; this is expected of spambots, right, they aren't going to put any effort into something that doesn't put something on your screen, but they would reply when you interacted with them because it's worth their time to evade detection. So their replies read like they were written by offshore clickfarm dudes, like someone was running a few hundred bot accounts and then they'd send the replies to some sort of centralized place, right, like so they could reply "no im not bot" or "thank you,,david". You could plausibly run a massive farm like that, like several hundred accounts per guy. (They didn't have an obvious commercial interest, so it's possible that people were right with their suspicion that Gab was using clickfarms to look more active than it was.)
But the behavior made it easy to detect them: I wrote a little script that would look at all of the activity an account did, look at the ratio of normal activity to broadcast-style activity and how flat their activity was over 24 hours, and then draw a sparkline graph so I could visually inspect. This was really helpful for identifying bots, no ML stuff required even. And then once that was easy to do, I could do k-means clustering to see who was following them, and I iced about a hundred accounts on FSE that had posted just gibberish or nothing at all but were following only Gab spambot accounts. (I hated the spam and it actually cost me money by forcing me to upgrade boxes on Frantech, but it was fun to come up with bot-detection stuff.)
> And it had a comped yellow circle during imagocaust 2024.
I don't know what that is, like I heard something had to do with making image-posting a "Pro" feature, but I also don't really have any interest in Gab except where they intersected with fedi.
wait, is the whole federated blacklist mandate sponsored bullcrap
i no longer read 500 pages of the fall of man per day
ma
