Hand crafted bot accounts and community targeted ads, what's the story?
Hand crafted bot accounts and community targeted ads, what's the story?
During the last two days it seems we have been "bombarded" with advertisement bots.
I found it curious, the advertisements are correctly targeted to sysadmins and security professionals. Meanwhile they have somewhat believable biographies (even if they are a little on the nose), suggesting hand crafted accounts.
Something they all have in common is their instance (discuss.tchncs.de) and that they have a "bachelors degree in computer science".
This is not the first time I've seen adbots on Lemmy, but it's the first time I've seen them on infosec.
Does anyone have any insight into the world of adbots they could share? I find myself increasingly curious in what goes on behind the curtains.
I can't speak specifically to the infosec bots, but I suspect it has something to do with all of the Lemmy instances mirroring every post. It could add a lot of weight to SEO for a various websites. So if they can get a post that doesn't get deleted, that's SEO fodder
Seems like Lemmy should add a
rel=canonicallink when browsing federated communities - this would “solve“ this issue (and would be the correct thing to do anyway).Do you mean
rel="nofollow"?
Also, one can create a personal instance of lemmy without users, create a bot to subscribe to many communities and they'd end up with a whole database to simply create personalized recommenders targeted to every single user.
Don't know if they are doing it now, but it should be pretty easy. One has everything, subscriptions, upvotes, all comments, all nicely served in a convenient relational db format
The SEO-angle is interesting, thank you for the insight!