by Avalaxy on 11/2/24, 11:49 PM with 5 comments
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?
by akerl_ on 11/2/24, 11:52 PM
Maybe detecting and blocking them without false positives is actually not trivial.
by nextn on 11/4/24, 4:24 PM
The technical reason is sending a message is free.
The non-technical reason is companies prefer to keep the majority of the advertising money instead of pay users with it. Users don't complain and don't try alternative services.
by pwg on 11/3/24, 1:11 AM
> Why is this still a thing?
Because the profit is significantly higher than the cost to create/run one.
by krapp on 11/2/24, 11:54 PM
Like Nigerian email scams, it's still a thing because it still works.
by vdvsvwvwvwvwv on 11/4/24, 10:20 AM
Another AI war