Same kind of pattern here.
(this list covers a two and a half hour registration time span)
All happily posting away. Another 1900 meaningless spam posts from 24 farmed accounts.
(I think there was barely 1 normal active user in in-betwen these accounts. The rest in-between accounts are inactive 0 post accounts)
Okay, so it looks like the pattern that you found is that someone picks a word or a name, then creates a bunch of accounts with various letters appended into the middle of the word.
I think it is reasonable to say that all of the accounts that use the same name were probably created by the same person. If two names were used to create accounts at roughly the same time, then these were probably also created by the same person.
One very important point that I want to make is that someone having any number of accounts is not, in itself a bad thing. There is nothing inherently wrong with someone having, say 5 accounts, nor is there anything wrong with having 5,000 accounts, although the later is probably very rare.
If you want to show if you want any action taken about this, is that these farmed accounts are negatively impacting the ability to discuss the subject matter of any given thread. Looking at the oldest posts of "sadyas" and related accounts' posts, it looks like that most of the posts are mostly one liners that most likely add very little to the discussion. If you can get one of these accounts banned, then the administration will also likely ban all of their alt accounts as well. Although I do not know how much effort these farmers put into hiding the fact that each of their accounts are controlled by the same person.
If an account farmer (or anyone) makes a large number of low value posts then they will likely get banned. A well established account will need to make a decent number of low value posts before they are in danger of getting banned. An account farmer could simply make generally interesting posts to get around violating this rule. An account farmer would need to put in a generally small amount of effort to not break this rule.
Clearly the farmer knows this and does have a certain quality, albeit low. The same mundane sentences are rehashed infinitely.
You know how hard it can be to build a case against 1 spammer. There are thousands of these farmed accounts.
By the time someone campaign's to get 1 banned, there are probably 100's more.
This is why it is up to Theymos to act against, or not. Nothing we can do.
I'll just try to highlight the scale of the problem. I never realised before.
Are you sure that there are in fact "hundreds" of people farming large numbers of accounts? I have not seen this kind of pattern before. Based on what you have posted publicly so far, I think it is more likely that a small number of people are farming the accounts you have posted, so I think banning only one of them would probably have a large impact.
If you assume that someone can make 0.001BTC per post (which I do not think is unrealistic, and is even maybe low), and over the long run, can make one post every 2 minutes (again, not unrealistic, but the post quality would not be very good), then someone can make roughly $18 per hour just by posting while participating in a signature campaign if they can find enough threads to reply to throughout the day.
When you compare this to making $8-$9 per hour, flipping burgers at McDonalds posting large numbers of posts can be very appealing to a certain group of people.
So, hire someone at $5 per hour, and keep $10 per hour in profit. Hire 10 people, keep $1000 per day profit. It must be happening?
These accounts I am highlighting are most likely created by 1 or 2 or very few people. It is a unique and identifiable circumstance.
It could easily be solved, independently of other multi-account or spam issues, as I think I have shown how easily they can be detected.
I am not sure that it would be advisable to hire people to post for you, as there would be a lot of risks. One risk would be that the employee simply steals your account, another would be that the employee scams with your account, ruining your account's reputation. If the employee's post quality is too low, then you would be risking that all of your accounts get banned. There is also the issue of figuring out how to get someone to do something on your behalf for $5 per hour, when they could do it on their on for $18 per hour.
I have however wondered about people using bots with fairly decent amounts of AI to post. I know that people have used bots to post in the past, however the AI in these cases have been non-existent.
There are certain vague rules that could be applied, but are not being.
The rules are meant to be broad so that a new rule does not need to be created for every unique situation, however they should not be vague so that people do not know prior to the fact if they are breaking a rule or not.
What rules would you propose implementing that would stop this kind of farming?
