r/technology • u/ArgentineBeauty • 18h ago

Society Ukraine Struck Yandex Data Centers, Russian Bots Went Silent—Now Questions Are Mounting

https://united24media.com/war-in-ukraine/ukraine-struck-yandex-data-centers-russian-bots-went-silent-now-questions-are-mounting-23339
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u/potatodrinker 18h ago

Social media engagement metrics were down like 30% suddenly and some of us had to explain, awkwardly, it's the non humans who died during those strikes. Path to recovery is to get more DCs up and flood our platforms with bots once more.

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u/GoodMix392 17h ago

I’d be curious to know how much the social media giants rely on bot traffic to convince investors that they are experiencing user growth each quarter. Like they must know that a significant portion of their traffic is just bots. I feel this is also cheating companies who pay to advertise on these platforms.

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u/xiaorobear 17h ago edited 16h ago

I feel this is also cheating companies who pay to advertise on these platforms.

Yeah, that is a big part of why they don't want to crack down on it. A similarly bad precursor to this that shows their history of scamming advertisers, back in the 2010s Facebook was found to have inflated its video viewership numbers by 150%-900%, by including things like the video being loaded as someone just scrolled past it. Adam (formerly of collegehumor) wrote that those numbers caused sites like collegehumor and funny or die to massively pivot into trying facebook content and paying to promote it because it seemed like the viewership numbers for it over linking to their external site would be massively worth it, but it just resulted in CH's ad revenue going way down and helping them go out of business. Facebook got a 40 million dollar fine, which is nothing.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/facebook-pay-40-million-under-proposed-settlement-video-metrics-suit-1245807/

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u/Opie59 16h ago

RIP Cracked.

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u/SamiraSimp 14h ago

rip, what a website. used to spend so much time there after school everyday, discussing posts with my friends the next day, it's a great example of the "older internet" compared to now. which is weird because at the time that was the "new internet" to me and it was already so different from what i considered the "old internet" at that time