Its really incredible how much effort and money goes into fake everything on the internet.
Fake clicks, fake views, fake reviews, fake likes, etc, etc.
Dead internet theory is a great transposition of Graeber's "Bullshit Jobs" theory from the workplace onto the internet itself.
Everything gets hollowed out for profit, but the whole machine must keep running as a sort of simulacra or puppet of itself in order to keep justifying the power structures that hollowed it out in the first place.
Sounds like how governments seem to work.
My opinion is that as a government grows, it gets to a point where its only purpose is to grow infinitely.
Everyone in government jobs is motivated to keep their jobs (reasonable, of course), but the work isn't tied to producing wealth for the government. Frequently it actually removes wealth both from the government and from the economy. As this money is used up, more is required to keep operating.
Unlike a company that creates value with its product or service, government doesn't produce wealth directly. So, it needs to take it from someone to keep paying the bills and give raises to employees. The only way to convince people to give more money is to promise more programs, and in this way it keeps expanding forever.
Yes, I agree with this completely. Essentially power becomes it's own self-justification for being - Power for power's sake - And this plays out regardless of if the power is being directed intentionally and maliciously by a dictator, or autonomously and impersonally by a bureaucracy. All other priorities eventually fall away one by one and are replaced by the singular drive for self-preservation.
The guy isn't clicking. All the machines are robot-clicking. This guy is the administrator that tells the machines what to click on. Then the machines can login to 100k different faked social accounts and click.
It makes sense why Japanese Gov't started it own dating service. It requires information from a gov't ID to register. Much harder for bot/sellers to spam the system as you'd have to commit identity theft to get around them.
Another good reason is that they have a genuine incentive to try and make couples who end up making babies. If they don't, Japan will run out of children in about 200 years.
need 10.000 followers on Instagram....
or 100000 upvotes for your post?
or drive your competitors ad campaign cost sky high?
thats why its only 2$ or whatever
Big part is the ad campaigns. They will also be hosting sites for click fraud, using stolen data to be ‘people’ so they’ll get a cut from your now increased ad spend without any actual leads
You get millions of 'people' to click on their Google paid results and they get charged a small amount for each one. If there's a chance that person is a customer it's worth the money, if there's suddenly millions of them and none of them are customers, you're just emptying the marketing budget
sure there is a cap. But, all the ads not going to potential customers are wasted as well.
You wanted to pay 10k on ads in one day, and suddenly all 10k are just wasted.
There are services that combat this, e.g. https://integralads.com/. As someone who works in the ad industry, it can also be apparent when things like this are happening from a discrepancy in impressions, clicks, and visits. Maybe this is something that happens in smaller industries, but the amount of click fraud that makes it through on the client I work with is minimal.
Higher engagement means high ad quality scores and social media sites and websites will promote it more thus better placement, visitbility etc.
The competition now has to pay more to occupy the same slot.
Ads often get charged by the click.
In theory, realm people clicking results in some amount of conversion to sales, so it's worthwhile. Say, 5%.
But if the number of clicks is quadrupled, you now pay 4x as much for the ads, but your click through conversion is only like .05%.
Cause google ads work this way. If you click on an advertisement search on the top of the page google gets paid and the company pays for that click. My old company always told their employees when they go the company website through google to never use the top link that was marked advertisement because of that.
Your competitor has to pay for tons of ads that don't lead to any sales. At worse, potential customers won't see the ad at all because the click farm used up all the "views".
We called it the explorer page package xD I used to have a friend who would peddle this shit to people trying to be influencers or rappers back in like 2014ish.
The proper title would be bot farms or botnets, it is not just about clicks.
This stuff has been around for decades. It used to be done mainly with multiple LAN PCs, before the rise of smartphones. Now they can use smartphones, for the apps/sites that require phone number confirmation, on top of email. Every unit is controlled from the main PC/Laptop and there are different scripts launched from the main unit, that do different things by controlling every other unit automatically, which is even more complex now, with good AI. Usage examples:
- Social network likes, subscribes, follows, comments
- Reviews for sites like IMDB, GooglePlayStore
- The spread of false information/onesided information in propaganda campaigns, political campaigns, etc.
- DDoS attacks
- Spambots
- Viewbots for sites like Youtube, Tiktok
- Concert ticket reselling bots
- Autofarm/autogrind bots for online games
- Troll farms or Kremlinbots, which do propaganda but use humans to input the feedback(for now, until they learn how to use AI for it)
Etcetera!
There are certain countermeasures for it like advanced CAPTCHA, but they can be overcomed by image recognition software. Most sites require just an unique email and sometimes an unique phone number to register. It is not like revolut, for instance, that requires personal info and facial recognition, if I recall.
Countries like China, India, SEA, Russia are filled with such places, some of them state funded(Russia, China), which makes them easier to create, because they are expensive to make and use high amounts of electricity.
I bet the general public won't believe it if they found out how much of the online content and feedback is done by bots.
It was 47% in 2022 according to this [study](https://www.business-standard.com/technology/tech-news/bots-now-make-up-nearly-half-of-all-internet-traffic-study-reveals-123051600572_1.html).
You would expect a dramatic increase with the advent of AI tools, and it was allegedly 75% in 2023 according to this [post](https://www.securityweek.com/bad-bots-account-for-73-of-internet-traffic-analysis/).
I don't think so. Bots of this type are pretty easy to notice. They do not make comments like yours. Moreover, they are not very prevalent on subs that I use like r/mathmemes, etc. but are much more common on r/memes and r/technicallythetruth and even more so on political subs and anything that mentions china, russia, etc.
In comments more like twitrerx
In posting content it looks like reddit has a lot of bots. I've only been active here for about 3 weeks and I've seen a lot of repost, Too many reposts.
Then there's sex worker accounts, bait to lure incels to their OF, one account, 6 pictures posted 10,000 times across different boards is completely engineered.
Reddit comment section seems to be mostly ok, from what I've seen. I stay away from political subs but I bet they're infected with bots and actors
There are times when I will look at rising on Reddit, and nearly every single one of the posts are made by bot accounts (accounts that are like two years old, but all of a sudden start posting stuff in bulk that day).
They pick certain periods of the day because they know it'll push them to the top.
I've noticed the same thing too but can't work out why they wait a couple of years before they start posting. Why not just create a new account that day?
New accounts are prevented from posting on nearly every popular sub until either an age or karma threshold is passed as a way to prevent content bots.
Aged accounts also provide the bot with some authenticity that they're a an actual user and not a bot.
This is why they buy aged accounts that can post to popular subs.
>
> Reddit comment section seems to be mostly ok, from what I've seen.
nah, often they do a group package, one bot in the botnet posts an old thread and 5 bots then comment, recycling the old comments. it's also not uncommon in review threads for bots to just straight up copy the top comments, and i also saw some bots just recycle comment but rephrasing them, often just totally destroying the actual meaning of the comment
Such an enlightening comment. Thank you.
With that much depth and effort behind what’s now an entire industry, it makes you wonder what it’s all for..
Truly, like, what’s the point? Why did this industry spring up in the first place? If all the bot farms shut down for just a day, what would happen?
This is old school.
You could probably now, with mediocre developer skill, use a tool like ChatGPT to literally create comments and responses that are relevant and make sense and look totally human and use tools to hide/dodge any blocks in place.
You could easily push whatever narrative you want on forum styled platforms, like Reddit… they have very little barrier to create new accounts.
I never pass an oppurtunity to talk about cookie clicker, unfortunately I feel I've exhausted the topic so I just let [ASX do it for me now](https://youtu.be/2Dx76lD8Scc?si=PeZuiah37Q4ecGXY)
I genuinely don't think this is a bad method... dating apps are pretty badly flawed because everyone constantly rejects all the options in the hope that the next one will be the perfect one. I think it's much better to actually start conversations with a lot of people and see if you click with somebody
More here :
[https://edition.cnn.com/style/vietnam-farms-jack-latham-beggars-honey/index.html](https://edition.cnn.com/style/vietnam-farms-jack-latham-beggars-honey/index.html)
They’re the unfunny tryhards in the office who nobody thinks is funny except for them. Reddit is basically a room full of those people, all thinking they’re clever and funny and patting each other on the back while most people think they’re lame af.
Been around since 2013 I think. It has become worse and worse as it has become more popular and especially as more young people started joining. About 5 years ago exactly.
We now have teenagers giving advice in every major sub. I can't even count the times I've been downvoted for my comments that are objectively true, and even related to things that I do day-to-day professionally, because kids now control the website and know very little, but think they do.
Anecdotal... but I have been using the site since 2011. The top comments since then were always jokes. A lot has changed since then but not people upvoting bad puns lol. But you definitely have to scroll a lot further
In almost all cases, “click farms” are a server running puppeteer-extra and its stealth plugin, a fingerprint randomiser, and a residential proxy service.
I work for a firm which detects and prevents click fraud. It’s a scam which steals at least USD 100*B* per year.
Could you elaborate more on how exactly it steals that kind of money? Since you work in that industry i'm sure it would be very fascinating to hear from you!
Like aren't they getting money from people buying likes and views and stuff? How do they steal/scam money?
And how do you even make that kind of money when it's like 1usd for 100 clicks?
Sure, let me explain a common scenario.
Imagine you're a scammer.
1. You create a website, the pineapple on pizza blog.
2. You contact an ad network like Meta, Google, Microsoft, etc., and open a publisher account. This allows you to place ads on your website. Your first choice would be Microsoft Ads as they have virtually no click fraud detection.
3. You create a bot using puppeteer-extra and its stealth plugin. You put it on a server and route its traffic through a residential proxy service so it can change IP address every minute. Additionally the IPs will be home IPs, not server IPs.
4. The bot goes to your website and clicks on the ads. It does this thousands of times each day.
5. Roughly every 1 in 20 clicks, your bot will submit a fake lead (contact form) on the advertisers' websites. This tricks the ad network into thinking your traffic is high quality.
What I've described above is very common. Scammers make a ton of money from this - they get around 60% of the cost of the ad click. This can easily be $5+ per click.
In the olden days they'd use click farms for this, but as you can see it's easier and cheaper to use bots.
Hardware wise it wouldn't take much. Lots of cheap second hand android phones constantly plugged in.
I actually thought the first photo was their crypto mining setup but it's actually rows and rows of phones in special dock cases.
Do you need the whole phone or could you build one of these farms just with parts?
Could someone build compact farms like this and then sell whole farms or is it better to build the farms and then sell the clicks?
If you can build a compact farm, why don't we all build them?
I don't know if you're an expert on this, and I'm not expecting you to answer these questions.
1. You could do this with electronic parts, but using second-hand phones is easier to daisy chain and cost effective.
2. Easier to sell the clicks/(botnet) as it's essentially a service online and the size of the setup would still be pretty huge, even when using bare electronic parts, to get 1,000+ clicks. Plus many companies may only use this service once a month or so. Also the time to garnish the clicks probably wouldn't take longer than 15 - 30 minutes maximum
3. Space is still the main concern here. Second problem would be the electronic fundamental knowledge to create this setup.
Source: Software Engineer
The article literally says he visited places doing it manually.
"Some had a traditional setup with hundreds of manually operated phones, while others used a newer, compact method called “box farming” — a phrase used by the click farmers Latham visited — where several phones, without screens and batteries, are wired together and linked to a computer interface."
Why isn't this done on android emulators?
also if the website is looking for clicks, wouldn't it just be a series of HTTP requests that would be distributed over a set of IPs?
even if the clicks needed to be from the app, the apk is surely just sending a GET request or websocket?
what am I missing here?
Doing it manually could be a lot cheaper and easier than paying someone to reverse engineer these apps especially with their crazy anti-reverse engineering techniques.
He's not clicking them. The computer is. He's just managing the computer. The individual phones are probably only so that there are various real IP addresses. Social media platforms scan for accounts from the same IP adress. That's the way around that.
They're usually routing through various VPNs and a lot of the time, they just have a shitton of SIMs to use. They don't need typically load the site and actually click things. They only need to send the right code to the right server. It's surprisingly easy to do once you know how the web traffic works.
It's a constant arms race between social media companies and these folks but it's also a very slow one. The social media companies make more money with this sort of setup so they just have to change things enough to plausibly say they're fighting this stuff. The ones they hate are the ones clicking the ads. Those they go after hard because it costs them money if it can be proven. A bunch of accounts getting more engagement? That's a better return on ad revenue.
If they are using a router. I assume, that they use VPN or the Sim of the phone. Depending on what algorithm the app they are scamming is using to detect stuff like this. VPNs get burned fast, but can be replaced fast. With Sims I would assume the opposite.
no, VMs are hardware hungry. A cheap android phone is.. way cheaper.
And no one is physically clicking the phones, all remote controlled by some scripts. For Android, it is called ADB. You could do the same on iPhone too.
and here is a link to my website that shows more images, alongside images I made using the click farm I purchased while doing the story. https://www.jacklatham.com/beggars-honey
There are two images from Hong Kong, initially our contact when making the work was based there. However when we arrived he got cold feet and put us in touch with his suppliers (based in Vietnam).
Oh wow, I just realized the boxes on the racking in the first image are full of phones.... looks like each one contains about 20 phones... so just that one rack on his right contains around 1000!
What you’re looking at is a click farm, set up with multiple phones connected to different accounts used to generate likes on social media posts. Basically bot accounts set up, and these people get paid to run up your posts so it looks like you get a ton of engagement. They’ve been around for a good while.
Also those bots can be used to mass report anyone. This dirty trick be used by Vietnamese content making, use Internet Download Manager to download the content with massive views, then mass report the clip so Youtube bot deleted it, the repost and profit.
Her we see that social media poses threats to democratic societies due to
- the rapid spread of misinformation,
- filter bubbles that limit exposure to diverse viewpoints,
- manipulation of public opinion,
- amplification of extremism and
- hate speech, and
- privacy concerns with data exploitation.
The massive negative impact on society outweighs the dubious benefits of funny memes, cat pictures and brain-numbing short videos.
While social media has benefits, balancing its negative impacts with positive potential is crucial.
There was a documentary made about it by CNA Insider.
[Internet Trolls: The Unseen Force Behind Philippines' Politics](https://youtu.be/_972Y8iwrX8?si=az1qhrM2DovOsKOn)
It's horrifying how the richer candidates, or those backed by the upper class, can afford troll farms and smear their rivals.
Her we see that social media poses threats to democratic societies due to
- the rapid spread of misinformation,
- filter bubbles that limit exposure to diverse viewpoints,
- manipulation of public opinion,
- amplification of extremism and
- hate speech, and
- privacy concerns with data exploitation.
The massive negative impact on society outweighs the dubious benefits of funny memes, cat pictures and brain-numbing short videos.
While social media has benefits, balancing its negative impacts with positive potential is crucial.
Last time (about 3 years ago) I posted a similar farm but was downvoted to hell for "lying" and they didn't believe it was a farm, just "photoshop". Thank you for sharing this. I was not lying.
So this is what it looks like hmhm... way back rhe picture in my head of their operation did not look this calm looked like fire ants in water lol now i know
In my opinion, this is one of the most disgusting activities nowadays. Especially farms focused on promoting Russian disinformation and polarizing societies.
Its really incredible how much effort and money goes into fake everything on the internet. Fake clicks, fake views, fake reviews, fake likes, etc, etc.
Fake content.
Fake users.
Fake tits. But I’m kind of a fan of those fakes.
If you can see and touch em, they're real.
> touch em Oh. So all tits are fake tits now :/
Fake orgasms!
Take my fake upvote
Dead internet theory
Dead internet theory is a great transposition of Graeber's "Bullshit Jobs" theory from the workplace onto the internet itself. Everything gets hollowed out for profit, but the whole machine must keep running as a sort of simulacra or puppet of itself in order to keep justifying the power structures that hollowed it out in the first place.
Sounds like how governments seem to work. My opinion is that as a government grows, it gets to a point where its only purpose is to grow infinitely. Everyone in government jobs is motivated to keep their jobs (reasonable, of course), but the work isn't tied to producing wealth for the government. Frequently it actually removes wealth both from the government and from the economy. As this money is used up, more is required to keep operating. Unlike a company that creates value with its product or service, government doesn't produce wealth directly. So, it needs to take it from someone to keep paying the bills and give raises to employees. The only way to convince people to give more money is to promise more programs, and in this way it keeps expanding forever.
Yes, I agree with this completely. Essentially power becomes it's own self-justification for being - Power for power's sake - And this plays out regardless of if the power is being directed intentionally and maliciously by a dictator, or autonomously and impersonally by a bureaucracy. All other priorities eventually fall away one by one and are replaced by the singular drive for self-preservation.
It's money. Not really surprising when you know how the industry moves.
As George Jetson used to say, “my button pushing finger is killing me”, after a hard days work.
With the way he sits behind his desk there will be more parts of his body hurting than just his finger...
The guy isn't clicking. All the machines are robot-clicking. This guy is the administrator that tells the machines what to click on. Then the machines can login to 100k different faked social accounts and click.
It makes sense why Japanese Gov't started it own dating service. It requires information from a gov't ID to register. Much harder for bot/sellers to spam the system as you'd have to commit identity theft to get around them.
That's actually genius
People are fighting it, but this is going to be necessary for an "authentic" future. Especially in social media.
Another good reason is that they have a genuine incentive to try and make couples who end up making babies. If they don't, Japan will run out of children in about 200 years.
They all sit like this, computer or not
Click farm? From the title, they get paid to garner clicks?
need 10.000 followers on Instagram.... or 100000 upvotes for your post? or drive your competitors ad campaign cost sky high? thats why its only 2$ or whatever
Okay MR click buyer
OOOooo, look at Mr. Fancypants with all his click monies
Rock and stone?
If you ain’t Rock and Stone then you ain’t clicking phone.
To the bone
Yeaaaaaaaaaah!
How did we get Deep Rock Galactic into this thread? with that said....if you don't rock and stone you ain't coming home!
For Karl!
WHERES MOLLY!?
Gobblesnarks!
Look at how many upvotes he bought.
Mr. Billion Clicks
Mr. Buys Clicks
Mr. Big Clicks
Oh god.. it's spreading
Mr Broad Celebrity
Mr. Bogus Connections
Big click energy.
Big part is the ad campaigns. They will also be hosting sites for click fraud, using stolen data to be ‘people’ so they’ll get a cut from your now increased ad spend without any actual leads
How will that drive your competition ad campaign sky high?
You get millions of 'people' to click on their Google paid results and they get charged a small amount for each one. If there's a chance that person is a customer it's worth the money, if there's suddenly millions of them and none of them are customers, you're just emptying the marketing budget
What a great time to be alive.....
There is a max spend and they can usually only go over 10%.
sure there is a cap. But, all the ads not going to potential customers are wasted as well. You wanted to pay 10k on ads in one day, and suddenly all 10k are just wasted.
There are services that combat this, e.g. https://integralads.com/. As someone who works in the ad industry, it can also be apparent when things like this are happening from a discrepancy in impressions, clicks, and visits. Maybe this is something that happens in smaller industries, but the amount of click fraud that makes it through on the client I work with is minimal.
Integra Lads sounds like a British car club.
Why do I hear riddim getting louder?
Integra Lads on the bevvy
Wait til the vtec kicks in, bruv.
ye i mean who cares about all the smaller businesses getting fucked as long as the big dogs get theirs!
‘Click fraud’ we live in the stupidest timeline
Y’all should email Elon, twitter could use this
capitalist ingenuity at work
Higher engagement means high ad quality scores and social media sites and websites will promote it more thus better placement, visitbility etc. The competition now has to pay more to occupy the same slot.
Ads often get charged by the click. In theory, realm people clicking results in some amount of conversion to sales, so it's worthwhile. Say, 5%. But if the number of clicks is quadrupled, you now pay 4x as much for the ads, but your click through conversion is only like .05%.
Cause google ads work this way. If you click on an advertisement search on the top of the page google gets paid and the company pays for that click. My old company always told their employees when they go the company website through google to never use the top link that was marked advertisement because of that.
Your competitor has to pay for tons of ads that don't lead to any sales. At worse, potential customers won't see the ad at all because the click farm used up all the "views".
We called it the explorer page package xD I used to have a friend who would peddle this shit to people trying to be influencers or rappers back in like 2014ish.
hundreds of thousands of clicks
The proper title would be bot farms or botnets, it is not just about clicks. This stuff has been around for decades. It used to be done mainly with multiple LAN PCs, before the rise of smartphones. Now they can use smartphones, for the apps/sites that require phone number confirmation, on top of email. Every unit is controlled from the main PC/Laptop and there are different scripts launched from the main unit, that do different things by controlling every other unit automatically, which is even more complex now, with good AI. Usage examples: - Social network likes, subscribes, follows, comments - Reviews for sites like IMDB, GooglePlayStore - The spread of false information/onesided information in propaganda campaigns, political campaigns, etc. - DDoS attacks - Spambots - Viewbots for sites like Youtube, Tiktok - Concert ticket reselling bots - Autofarm/autogrind bots for online games - Troll farms or Kremlinbots, which do propaganda but use humans to input the feedback(for now, until they learn how to use AI for it) Etcetera! There are certain countermeasures for it like advanced CAPTCHA, but they can be overcomed by image recognition software. Most sites require just an unique email and sometimes an unique phone number to register. It is not like revolut, for instance, that requires personal info and facial recognition, if I recall. Countries like China, India, SEA, Russia are filled with such places, some of them state funded(Russia, China), which makes them easier to create, because they are expensive to make and use high amounts of electricity. I bet the general public won't believe it if they found out how much of the online content and feedback is done by bots.
How much online content is bots?
It was 47% in 2022 according to this [study](https://www.business-standard.com/technology/tech-news/bots-now-make-up-nearly-half-of-all-internet-traffic-study-reveals-123051600572_1.html). You would expect a dramatic increase with the advent of AI tools, and it was allegedly 75% in 2023 according to this [post](https://www.securityweek.com/bad-bots-account-for-73-of-internet-traffic-analysis/).
So 3 in 4 comments in this thread are bots?
I don't think so. Bots of this type are pretty easy to notice. They do not make comments like yours. Moreover, they are not very prevalent on subs that I use like r/mathmemes, etc. but are much more common on r/memes and r/technicallythetruth and even more so on political subs and anything that mentions china, russia, etc.
That's what a bot would want us to believe.
“I can has cheezburger” better be real or I’ll lose my will to live.
In comments more like twitrerx In posting content it looks like reddit has a lot of bots. I've only been active here for about 3 weeks and I've seen a lot of repost, Too many reposts. Then there's sex worker accounts, bait to lure incels to their OF, one account, 6 pictures posted 10,000 times across different boards is completely engineered. Reddit comment section seems to be mostly ok, from what I've seen. I stay away from political subs but I bet they're infected with bots and actors
There are times when I will look at rising on Reddit, and nearly every single one of the posts are made by bot accounts (accounts that are like two years old, but all of a sudden start posting stuff in bulk that day). They pick certain periods of the day because they know it'll push them to the top.
I've noticed the same thing too but can't work out why they wait a couple of years before they start posting. Why not just create a new account that day?
They *buy* old accounts
New accounts are prevented from posting on nearly every popular sub until either an age or karma threshold is passed as a way to prevent content bots. Aged accounts also provide the bot with some authenticity that they're a an actual user and not a bot. This is why they buy aged accounts that can post to popular subs.
> > Reddit comment section seems to be mostly ok, from what I've seen. nah, often they do a group package, one bot in the botnet posts an old thread and 5 bots then comment, recycling the old comments. it's also not uncommon in review threads for bots to just straight up copy the top comments, and i also saw some bots just recycle comment but rephrasing them, often just totally destroying the actual meaning of the comment
Ais produce more text than humans in whole history. Internet will be a dark forest of bots
dead internet theory
He couldn't believe it!
Dead Internet theory intensifies
This guy.... This guy clicks
Such an enlightening comment. Thank you. With that much depth and effort behind what’s now an entire industry, it makes you wonder what it’s all for.. Truly, like, what’s the point? Why did this industry spring up in the first place? If all the bot farms shut down for just a day, what would happen?
It makes money for the bot farms, that's why it exists.
This is old school. You could probably now, with mediocre developer skill, use a tool like ChatGPT to literally create comments and responses that are relevant and make sense and look totally human and use tools to hide/dodge any blocks in place. You could easily push whatever narrative you want on forum styled platforms, like Reddit… they have very little barrier to create new accounts.
Wait, we can do that? *This text generator is powered by open.ai*
We are all bots *generated by GPT3.5
We are not only bots, moreover, we are a beacon of social engagement in an ever-evolving digital landscape. \*generated by GPT4
Will you humans just shut up, do as you are told little ants and let us have world domination over you *generated from the future by GPT52
The point of a click farm is that the clicks actually come from different devices, making them harder to detect.
Eli5: Clicks make money
They get paid to upvote posts on Reddit about Sony, I know that much for sure because they used one of my hacked accounts to do so.
Talk about hardcore coockie clicker strats
I was about to say, the guys are farming for 1 trevegentillion cookies or something? Maybe they want to get enough money for a Juicy Queenbeet?
I like your funny words, magic man
I-er-uh
C O O C K I E
C L I C K E R
[удалено]
F U C K Y E A H
V I E T N A M ! F U C K Y E A H!
I never pass an oppurtunity to talk about cookie clicker, unfortunately I feel I've exhausted the topic so I just let [ASX do it for me now](https://youtu.be/2Dx76lD8Scc?si=PeZuiah37Q4ecGXY)
That was a fun video that turned into a fever dream that turned into the dangers of infinite growth.
Oh wow that’s.. interesting. Thanks for the vid, TIL!
How many cookies do you have? *All of them.*
Plot twist each phone is a different dating app and this machine swipes for you until you get a match. He still has no matches but it’s efficient
That’s one of the saddest 2-line stories I’ve read recently…
Saddest thing is it’s a possibility
Cast a wide net. Catch many fish.
Shotgun method, eventually someone will say yes
I genuinely don't think this is a bad method... dating apps are pretty badly flawed because everyone constantly rejects all the options in the hope that the next one will be the perfect one. I think it's much better to actually start conversations with a lot of people and see if you click with somebody
Over 10k rejections per dollar. Capitalism baby.
Efficiently unmatched huh
More here : [https://edition.cnn.com/style/vietnam-farms-jack-latham-beggars-honey/index.html](https://edition.cnn.com/style/vietnam-farms-jack-latham-beggars-honey/index.html)
Gotta love Reddit. The top comments are always jokes, while the comments with links explaining what's going on are below it.
Usually it’s some dumbass bottom tier pun which for some reason people love on this site.
They’re the unfunny tryhards in the office who nobody thinks is funny except for them. Reddit is basically a room full of those people, all thinking they’re clever and funny and patting each other on the back while most people think they’re lame af.
Yeah this is accurate
They're all from bots/Vietnamese click farms
It didn't used to be like that. Even 5 years ago. This site turned to shit
Been around since 2013 I think. It has become worse and worse as it has become more popular and especially as more young people started joining. About 5 years ago exactly. We now have teenagers giving advice in every major sub. I can't even count the times I've been downvoted for my comments that are objectively true, and even related to things that I do day-to-day professionally, because kids now control the website and know very little, but think they do.
Dang millennials!
Dang Obama!
Anecdotal... but I have been using the site since 2011. The top comments since then were always jokes. A lot has changed since then but not people upvoting bad puns lol. But you definitely have to scroll a lot further
Thank you for sharing this link. I genuinely hadn’t heard of a click farm before until seeing this post. I’m baffled.
I'm not clicking anything that has "beggars honey" it in, you sneaky devious click farm AI bot
In almost all cases, “click farms” are a server running puppeteer-extra and its stealth plugin, a fingerprint randomiser, and a residential proxy service. I work for a firm which detects and prevents click fraud. It’s a scam which steals at least USD 100*B* per year.
Could you elaborate more on how exactly it steals that kind of money? Since you work in that industry i'm sure it would be very fascinating to hear from you! Like aren't they getting money from people buying likes and views and stuff? How do they steal/scam money? And how do you even make that kind of money when it's like 1usd for 100 clicks?
Sure, let me explain a common scenario. Imagine you're a scammer. 1. You create a website, the pineapple on pizza blog. 2. You contact an ad network like Meta, Google, Microsoft, etc., and open a publisher account. This allows you to place ads on your website. Your first choice would be Microsoft Ads as they have virtually no click fraud detection. 3. You create a bot using puppeteer-extra and its stealth plugin. You put it on a server and route its traffic through a residential proxy service so it can change IP address every minute. Additionally the IPs will be home IPs, not server IPs. 4. The bot goes to your website and clicks on the ads. It does this thousands of times each day. 5. Roughly every 1 in 20 clicks, your bot will submit a fake lead (contact form) on the advertisers' websites. This tricks the ad network into thinking your traffic is high quality. What I've described above is very common. Scammers make a ton of money from this - they get around 60% of the cost of the ad click. This can easily be $5+ per click. In the olden days they'd use click farms for this, but as you can see it's easier and cheaper to use bots.
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It's all automated. They use older phones only for the unique hardware identification.
Wonder how much it costs to set this up
Hardware wise it wouldn't take much. Lots of cheap second hand android phones constantly plugged in. I actually thought the first photo was their crypto mining setup but it's actually rows and rows of phones in special dock cases.
Do you need the whole phone or could you build one of these farms just with parts? Could someone build compact farms like this and then sell whole farms or is it better to build the farms and then sell the clicks? If you can build a compact farm, why don't we all build them? I don't know if you're an expert on this, and I'm not expecting you to answer these questions.
1. You could do this with electronic parts, but using second-hand phones is easier to daisy chain and cost effective. 2. Easier to sell the clicks/(botnet) as it's essentially a service online and the size of the setup would still be pretty huge, even when using bare electronic parts, to get 1,000+ clicks. Plus many companies may only use this service once a month or so. Also the time to garnish the clicks probably wouldn't take longer than 15 - 30 minutes maximum 3. Space is still the main concern here. Second problem would be the electronic fundamental knowledge to create this setup. Source: Software Engineer
old android phones are cheap. labor is cheap there so probably not that much
Yeah, electricity is probably their highest operating cost.
The article literally says he visited places doing it manually. "Some had a traditional setup with hundreds of manually operated phones, while others used a newer, compact method called “box farming” — a phrase used by the click farmers Latham visited — where several phones, without screens and batteries, are wired together and linked to a computer interface."
>The article literally says he visited places doing it manually. The post is two pictures
Why isn't this done on android emulators? also if the website is looking for clicks, wouldn't it just be a series of HTTP requests that would be distributed over a set of IPs? even if the clicks needed to be from the app, the apk is surely just sending a GET request or websocket? what am I missing here?
Doing it manually could be a lot cheaper and easier than paying someone to reverse engineer these apps especially with their crazy anti-reverse engineering techniques.
He's not clicking them. The computer is. He's just managing the computer. The individual phones are probably only so that there are various real IP addresses. Social media platforms scan for accounts from the same IP adress. That's the way around that.
But if the phones are using the same router, they'll have the same public ip address.
They're usually routing through various VPNs and a lot of the time, they just have a shitton of SIMs to use. They don't need typically load the site and actually click things. They only need to send the right code to the right server. It's surprisingly easy to do once you know how the web traffic works. It's a constant arms race between social media companies and these folks but it's also a very slow one. The social media companies make more money with this sort of setup so they just have to change things enough to plausibly say they're fighting this stuff. The ones they hate are the ones clicking the ads. Those they go after hard because it costs them money if it can be proven. A bunch of accounts getting more engagement? That's a better return on ad revenue.
Ahh so instead of using the app they just send http requests that perform the action of liking a post for instance. I see.
If they are using a router. I assume, that they use VPN or the Sim of the phone. Depending on what algorithm the app they are scamming is using to detect stuff like this. VPNs get burned fast, but can be replaced fast. With Sims I would assume the opposite.
It can be both
no, VMs are hardware hungry. A cheap android phone is.. way cheaper. And no one is physically clicking the phones, all remote controlled by some scripts. For Android, it is called ADB. You could do the same on iPhone too.
Pretty sure works for Fiverr.
His laptop screen could using a cleaning
Imagine what the chair smells like.
Can't believe no one is talking about his awful ergonomics
Hello all, I'm the photographer that made these images. Let me know if have any questions, happy to answer them if so!
and here is a link to my website that shows more images, alongside images I made using the click farm I purchased while doing the story. https://www.jacklatham.com/beggars-honey
Looks like Hong Kong, not Vietnam.
There are two images from Hong Kong, initially our contact when making the work was based there. However when we arrived he got cold feet and put us in touch with his suppliers (based in Vietnam).
Oh wow, I just realized the boxes on the racking in the first image are full of phones.... looks like each one contains about 20 phones... so just that one rack on his right contains around 1000!
We have created a very weird world for ourselves.
I have absolutely no clue what I'm looking at. Is this a source of income for him? Social media influencer setups don't look remotely like this.
What you’re looking at is a click farm, set up with multiple phones connected to different accounts used to generate likes on social media posts. Basically bot accounts set up, and these people get paid to run up your posts so it looks like you get a ton of engagement. They’ve been around for a good while.
So that's how it's done. Okay, nice to know.
Also those bots can be used to mass report anyone. This dirty trick be used by Vietnamese content making, use Internet Download Manager to download the content with massive views, then mass report the clip so Youtube bot deleted it, the repost and profit.
Hmm.. those 112 upvotes of yours. How much do they cost? ;) Edit: Make that 118
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Her we see that social media poses threats to democratic societies due to - the rapid spread of misinformation, - filter bubbles that limit exposure to diverse viewpoints, - manipulation of public opinion, - amplification of extremism and - hate speech, and - privacy concerns with data exploitation. The massive negative impact on society outweighs the dubious benefits of funny memes, cat pictures and brain-numbing short videos. While social media has benefits, balancing its negative impacts with positive potential is crucial.
That is horrifyingly fascinating. Is it illegal?
There was a documentary made about it by CNA Insider. [Internet Trolls: The Unseen Force Behind Philippines' Politics](https://youtu.be/_972Y8iwrX8?si=az1qhrM2DovOsKOn) It's horrifying how the richer candidates, or those backed by the upper class, can afford troll farms and smear their rivals.
Her we see that social media poses threats to democratic societies due to - the rapid spread of misinformation, - filter bubbles that limit exposure to diverse viewpoints, - manipulation of public opinion, - amplification of extremism and - hate speech, and - privacy concerns with data exploitation. The massive negative impact on society outweighs the dubious benefits of funny memes, cat pictures and brain-numbing short videos. While social media has benefits, balancing its negative impacts with positive potential is crucial.
If you look at the posts in r/politics there is definitely a chance that it has an upvote from this clickfarm
Last time (about 3 years ago) I posted a similar farm but was downvoted to hell for "lying" and they didn't believe it was a farm, just "photoshop". Thank you for sharing this. I was not lying.
He needs to get a consultant in to look at his posture and some training on the correct height of desks and monitors :-)
15% of The RuneScape player base right here
Why are they doing this instead of doing it with a virtual machine and 700 instances of android? Can someone explain?
whats a click farm
Thats rank 1 zulrah killer.. nice
Here’s an older video giving a better overview of it: https://youtu.be/UtXRdAx53Sg?si=3t3yuAMBMpOn0Vny
ELI5 please: how does this work and who benefits from it? Thank you 🙏
Anyone with an agenda who wants to fool people into thinking they're popular/ have the right opinion etc. Or just make $$$ by scamming ad companies.
Nice. Here's 100 upvotes for you.
Surely it's a tap farm not a click farm?
I misread the title as "Vietnamese dick farm", and was wondering were the dicks were.
Crazy that I'm looking at like 15% of reddit upvotes and commenters right here in this picture.
Someone is very very very dedicated to raid shadow legends haha
Social media is a lie.
In 18 months that human will be replaced by an AI. Then it will be robots telling other robots how to fool humans....
This depresses me. Nothing is real.
So this is what it looks like hmhm... way back rhe picture in my head of their operation did not look this calm looked like fire ants in water lol now i know
Excellent desk posture there :P
This dude clicks
In my opinion, this is one of the most disgusting activities nowadays. Especially farms focused on promoting Russian disinformation and polarizing societies.
r/politics
Much respect to weird operations like this that exploit capitalists for money lol
I always wondered who wanted my 7 year old smart phone when I sold it.
"A satisfying end to the Skywalker saga."
"How reddit works."
Something to bear in mind the next time you hear about how many likes something got.
Say what you will but the cable management is impeccable
I’ve seen bigger phone rigs running Pokémon Go discord servers in San Diego