Pro 5 a "Must Have"?

[mino]

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What is the point of this though? Is there some way to gain something? (the LLM thing)

When you want to do a scam/ad campaign, you need accounts that have some history - so the scam post is not automatically/immediately flagged once you make it.

Preferrably, you also want accounts that not only have some posts, but have the posts spread over time.

This makes it impractical for the actual scammer to setup the accounts as that would need some long-term planning.
Instead, there is a sprawling marketplace on the shadow/dark web where kiddos from poor countries "farm" accounts and then offer to sell these to the highest bidder. That "highest bidder" may offer as little as $1 per account "bundle". But if you have no costs /you pay internet anyway/ and your time is mostly free as well, say en route to school, that is still a nice side-income in some rural place in a poor country.

Naturally, LLMs help a *lot* in this - they allow to post semi-sensible posts even into communities the farmer has zero clue about so wouldn't have even attempted without them.

The only defense is to wipe such accounts ASAP. There are humans on the other side, and when they see it is not working, they give up and look for an easier target.

ADD:
Another market, is you can contract such kiddos for a hit-job. Say your competitor has a sprawling customer/user community which you want to FUD or plainly to break it up. Is easier to achieve than one may think.

nVidia, the GPU maker, was known for this a decade or so ago. And it was pretty effective - ATI/AMD reputation in the respective market never recovered. Is sometimes called "guerilla marketing". The most basic is to amplify some existing issue, there will always be one, such that it becomes agenda-setting.

For all these things to work, you need the "audience" to listen - so you need to seem authentic-enough for that.

 

[PaulMarcel]

What is the point of this though? Is there some way to gain something? (the LLM thing)

I'm also trying to understand what this LLM message thing brings to Kevison as he/she chimed in on 3-4 different threads around the same time yesterday.

If they posted a spam link, it would be immediately deleted and account likely banned. If they post a "thoughtfully researched" reply, they can go back in 2-3 months when the thread is quiet and edit that post to include a spam link. Someone may click on it, but mostly search engines pick it up from several sites and will consider it more reliable since it is on a lot of sites and on posts that are older. I'm sure the algorithms are much more advanced now for detecting that, but for awhile, that worked really well.

 

[leakyroof]

What is the point of this though? Is there some way to gain something? (the LLM thing)

I'm also trying to understand what this LLM message thing brings to Kevison as he/she chimed in on 3-4 different threads around the same time yesterday.

If they posted a spam link, it would be immediately deleted and account likely banned. If they post a "thoughtfully researched" reply, they can go back in 2-3 months when the thread is quiet and edit that post to include a spam link. Someone may click on it, but mostly search engines pick it up from several sites and will consider it more reliable since it is on a lot of sites and on posts that are older. I'm sure the algorithms are much more advanced now for detecting that, but for awhile, that worked really well.

Geez,  it's a scary world out there.. [doh] [doh]
I read the Kevison post and throught BOT too at the time. Didn't realize an actual Human could be behind it.  [blink]