
634 Diggs, 17 comments, and 100 comment upvotes for Viagra - talbina
http://i.imgur.com/yHtLy.png
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chaosmachine
That's an impressive number of fake accounts. Here's a permanent screenshot:

<http://i.imgur.com/yHtLy.png>

I wonder if they're using some kind of blackhat technique to trick regular
users into upvoting it.

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JonnieCache
Very likely an example of the 'sockpuppet management' software discussed here
last week IMO.

EDIT: you can still see the page in google's cache:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://digg.com/news/lifestyle/rxpills_best_discounts_for_all_pharmacy_check_out_or_men_s_health_category)

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DanielBMarkham
Perhaps this says something about the average Digg user that they would not
want to publicly share :)

Sorry for the snarky comment, I just had to. As other commenters have pointed
out, we are entering into the age of "online personna warfare" -- which in my
mind could end up spawning true AI since the monetary stakes are so high, as
annoying as it all is right now.

Brain-teaser question: if you had a hundred friends online, and they all knew
you and joked with you and provided support when you were having a bad day,
asked about your family, etc. -- as long as they blatantly did not try to sell
you anything, perhaps just mentioning a product every few months as part of a
normal conversation, would it really matter if they were robots?

Product placement is going to go from actors in movies to robots on internet
sites. Right now it's just happening in a very klunky and annoying fashion,
but it'll get smoother. Very strange times we live in.

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JonnieCache
_> would it really matter if they were robots?_

Yes, because their only motive is profit. All their jokes, all their friendly
advice was only ever given in order to extract some of my money and therefore
my time. No matter how far they go to hide this fact, however genuinely useful
or comforting their presence, they have only one reason for their existence
and that fact would forever offend me and I'm sure others too.

Imagine if one of your human friends behaved in this way, persisted in a
relationship with you solely because they were being paid to do so. You would
feel violated, and in my mind if that friend were a robot, I would feel more
violated. At least in the case of a human, I can reason that they needed the
cash.

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DanielBMarkham
So you're not mad when a Pepsi can appears in your favorite movie but you
would be mad if the robot that had been playing a killer game of chess with
you for the last hour told a joke that mentioned a famous comedy album?

Both of these you get value from. Both of these are providing some kind of
marketing "push" for some product.

How about your best friend who loves some certain kind of music and is always
putting links to songs you don't care about in your Facebook feed?

Like I said, the purpose was just to mess with your head a bit. Apologies if I
made it sound like some kind of evil overlord controlling armies of robots.
That's not what I meant at all.

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JonnieCache
I _am_ mad when a brand is obviously and garishly inserted into a movie in a
way that breaks my suspension of disbelief. I am not mad when it adds to the
suspension of disbelief by making the setting seem more real. Product
placement is obviously banned on the BBC, and it seems totally ridiculous when
characters in soaps/sitcoms only ever ask for 'beer' or 'wine' in the pub.

The second case is an artistic choice as well as a marketing choice, unlike
the blatant mentioning of product names in dialogue that is so annoying. This
corresponds to my point about social interaction _solely_ for profit being the
problem.

Similarly, my friend who likes certain music spams my feed with links because
he likes me and because he wants me to share the enjoyment he derives from the
music he's found. He may also want to increase the income of the band, but
that isn't the only reason he puts the links there. I have other friends who
are in bands or promote bands, and it _does_ sometimes annoy me when they spam
my feed.

I might be mad if a chess robot brought up a product, it would likely depend
on how well it blended into the conversation in a similar way to how my
attitude to movie product placements varies with how well they blend into the
movie.

It would also depend on how good the robot was as a chess partner compared to
other robots that namedrop products more/less. If it outshines every product
on the market I might put up with a lot of marketing. By then we'll probably
have adblock for our implant firmware anyway.

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DanielBMarkham
Yes, that's my point: as robots become more human, their activities will
"blend in", as you say, with the things we normally do with folks. Right now
it's much too jarring.

Don't get me wrong -- I'm not rooting for the robots. Far from it. I don't
want to live in a world where we are all networked together and have armies of
little robot friends to help us with all of our needs. Yuck.

I was getting more to the true nature of the Turing Test. If you can't tell
whether there's a person or robot talking on the other end, it really doesn't
matter. In fact, you could argue that, for our own personal needs, internet
bots could end up becoming much better "people" than real people. Which is
very strange.

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JonnieCache
_> internet bots could end up becoming much better "people" than real people.
Which is very strange._

<http://xkcd.com/810/>

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jedberg
I have to say, as someone who has to deal with the same problem every day, I
feel bad for the Digg folks. They are a good group of engineers, and spam is
truly a hard problem -- much harder than most people realize.

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talbina
Does Reddit have the same problem?

Also, would something like this make it to the front page? And if it didn't
(because of editorial input), how come it hasn't been deleted?

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Splines
Someone tried astroturfing /r/gaming last week and were called out on it.

Truly blatent spam is extremely rare - it's the stuff that's mostly legitimate
that has an ulterior motive that is hard to spot.

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adrianN
If it provides enough legitimate content to be useful to the users, it will
get upvotes regardless of its ulterior motives. At a certain point an
advertisement is entertaining enough to be viewed voluntarily. cf Old Spice
guy.

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talbina
And it was just deleted.

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clistctrl
I've been thinking about this for the past few days. It would seem captchas
are an effective tool for screening bots etc out. But what happens once they
pass the security line? (the body scanner didn't catch them before boarding
the plane...?)

how do you identify a bot post in the wild? It seems to me that there is an
equal possibility that a post could be from a bot as it could be from a real
person... is there a way to use distributions, and some kind of artificial
intelligence to search for fingerprints? Another curious question, how do you
test it? Is there any accounts that we for sure have spotted as "probably an
intelligence bot"

EDIT: I just got another thought, maybe it would be possible to setup a honey
pot?

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jedberg
> is there a way to use distributions, and some kind of artificial
> intelligence to search for fingerprints?

Yes. :) I wish I could say more, but I don't want to give away the secrets to
reddit's spam detection.

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CytokineStorm
Isn't reddit's code open source? <https://github.com/reddit/reddit>

Or are there parts (like the spam detection algorithm) that are kept secret?

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jedberg
We keep the spam detection parts secret. It is the only part of the code we
hide. We wish we didn't have to, but sadly, spam is an arms race.

