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Ask HN: Why are social media spam bots still a thing?

6 pointsby Avalaxy7 months ago
Specifically Instagram. After many years, I still get regular messages from spam bots, usually pretending to be women that are romantically interested. It seems trivial to ban (or even prevent) those accounts, from a technical perspective. Reporting them also doesn't seem to do much. Why is this still a thing? This should have been a solved problem years ago no? Are there, besides technical reasons, other reasons to keep spam bots alive on their platforms?

5 comments

akerl_7 months ago
Maybe detecting and blocking them without false positives is actually not trivial.
nextn6 months ago
The technical reason is sending a message is free.<p>The non-technical reason is companies prefer to keep the majority of the advertising money instead of pay users with it. Users don&#x27;t complain and don&#x27;t try alternative services.
pwg7 months ago
&gt; Why is this still a thing?<p>Because the profit is significantly higher than the cost to create&#x2F;run one.
krapp7 months ago
Like Nigerian email scams, it&#x27;s still a thing because it still works.
vdvsvwvwvwvwv6 months ago
Another AI war