Ask HN: Why are social media spam bots still a thing?

by Avalaxy on 11/2/2024, 11:49:21 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 11/2/2024, 11:52:58 PM

    Maybe detecting and blocking them without false positives is actually not trivial.

  • by nextn on 11/4/2024, 4:24:51 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 11/3/2024, 1:11:19 AM

    > Why is this still a thing?

    Because the profit is significantly higher than the cost to create/run one.

  • by krapp on 11/2/2024, 11:54:56 PM

    Like Nigerian email scams, it's still a thing because it still works.

  • by vdvsvwvwvwvwv on 11/4/2024, 10:20:42 AM

    Another AI war