I am back.

submitted by magnora7[A] from self.SaidIt

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[–]Zapped 7 insightful - 3 fun7 insightful - 2 fun8 insightful - 3 fun -  (3 children)

Good to see you back and active.

Do you have the time to look at the timing of the attacks, like every 3 months or after a newsworthy event? Have you tried to put together a pattern of when the posts or comments are made, like between the hours of 10am and 2am EST? Do the same accounts interact with each other in the comment sections more often than other accounts? Do some of the accounts that interact but have different "personalities" use the similar language or phrases?

I'm sure you're way ahead of this, but I'm curious to what you find out, when and if you feel its ok to disclose what you find. I would like to reaffirm what you said about not interacting with those accounts. It only feeds them what they are hungry for.

[–]magnora7[S] 18 insightful - 6 fun18 insightful - 5 fun19 insightful - 6 fun -  (2 children)

Glad to see you too. The pattern of when they are around seems to be pretty random. I do notice they spend about a few hours on saidit, and then will go away for that day and come back the next day at some random time. I see this over and over, for literally 20-30 days in a row, each day burning through about 5-20 accounts, some months old, depending on how much traction they got that day. There will be a few months of this, then a month or two off. Then back on again. For 3 years now.

I have lots of various patterns to recognize them by, but I don't want to say too much about that or else they'll hide those patterns and then my job will become even more difficult. But I will say they also post garbage spam from many accounts like "Samsung router drivers" links while they do these cultural attacks. And the "Americans" comment bot will suddenly spring to life at the same time as well, sometimes itself making 3 accounts a day, like today. So it's a multi-faceted approach, using many accounts, diluting the quality in many ways simultaneously. I used to think it was just ad bots (which it is sometimes) but I've noticed lately that the volume of ad posts flares up dramatically always at the exact same days as we get cultural attacks too, so I've begun to realize they're related. Someone just wants to turn this site to a trash heap by filling it with various types of garbage and seems to be being paid to do it given their tenacity. And that troll farm probably has a list of 10-20 forums they hit and cycle through, which is why they'll hit this one heavy for a few hours, go away to another site, and then come back the next day.

I mean if you think about it, if reddit can destroy all its competition by paying a couple people $12/hr, why wouldn't they? Or if China can destroy places of free discussion by paying some random college students to poison the well of discussion and never get caught, why wouldn't they? There's lots of groups out there who could be doing this, but whoever it is, it's become pretty clear it's a very purposeful campaign. One with focus, tenacity over literally years, and a lot of developed complex strategies they cycle through like a playbook. This also implies money is involved to me.

As much as I hate it, it seems to be the most reasonable explanation given what I've seen across the last 3 years. And this exact thing is affecting a lot of forums. It's destroying and souring the culture of the internet and everyone can see it, which has non-internet cultural repercussions too. I hope those people feel ashamed about what they're doing, but I'm not sure they're capable of shame. Which is why they're such a great fit for the job of destroying human culture. If he were alive, I wonder what Aaron Swartz would say about this type of cultural attack, because it certainly is the attack style of the new decade.

Basically it seems DDOS attacks to take down websites are old hat, cultural attacks are the new way. If the culture is destroyed, and no one will go there because it's so hostile and alienating, then what use is the forum? This is so much harder to defend against than a DDOS attack. In fact I would say weakness to this style of attack may be the main reason why so many reddit alternatives have failed.

Anyway, it's true that the best strategy is still not to feed the trolls. Just report the comment or post, and PM me if you think you've spotted one. Thanks!

[–]Seahorse 6 insightful - 3 fun6 insightful - 2 fun7 insightful - 3 fun -  (1 child)

This is very interesting.

I wonder who's at the heart of this!

[–]magnora7[S] 7 insightful - 4 fun7 insightful - 3 fun8 insightful - 4 fun -  (0 children)

It is interesting, but I think it's going to become increasingly widespread. I believe soon almost every government and major corporation will soon have hired internet shill groups. They call it "native advertising", and it's becoming the norm because of how well it works compared to traditional advertising and propaganda. I know this is something Monsanto has done for at least a decade. It's also known both Democrats and Republicans do this too with ShareBlue and Cambridge Analytica.

Soon it will be every organization, and the internet will be a complete mess because of it. Especially with GPT-3 commenting AI getting so good, it's becoming easier to automate human-like responses on platforms like saidit and reddit. One person can act as 100 low-IQ people simultaneously by using these bots. They can create an intelligent crowd of people that all have the same bias. It's enough to overwhelm a forum, and when it becomes very close to human-like responses it can be hard to administrate because you can't differentiate the bots from the real people, and this is taken advantage of by the attackers.