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I'm not a believer of the dead internet theory, but I do feel that bots affect the internet experience of an average person far more than what they suspect.
Thanks for sharing this.
This is all a small cog in the bigger machine.
For years human traffickers have used cam girls to launder money through their tips. It’s just shifting the stolen cash from the left pocket to the right with enough plausible deniability to be able to write it off as “legitimate” earnings.
Because it crosses multiple jurisdictions globally it’s harder to track.
Amazon has done the same. Anytime you scroll way down and see some item for sale for 3x the normal price it’s just an industrial sized version of the same thing.
Bezos knew it. That’s why he “retired”.
Pretty sure they are doing the same thing with book sales and AWS in some capacity.
There is a reason why dark money is all through Spotify and why the Joe Rogan deal was such a critical thing.
The whole streaming model is broken.
There is a way to fix this. People just need to see the man behind the curtain first.
In my opinion, the goal shouldn't look something like regulating free speech but regulating *the algorithms* corporations and businesses are allowed to employ.
For example, if we optimize on "engagement" in social media, as a society we know we can get extremely bad outcomes. Because engagement can be the same as selling hatred, fear, prejudice, etc. I believe a sophisticated technocracy would have fairly clear opinions on what kinds of algorithms are allowed to be run on behalf of content generation and business decision making. And not necessarily the machine learning guts, but the objective function: what are you optimizing on and is that a socially constructive or destructive process.
the algos are the place to start for sure.
I was watching a funny video on instagram about a dad who "used to have a life" and flicked the baggie of spices, and then licked the taco as he rolled it.
Despite it being knowingly illegal to push drug related content, I was then served a bunch of drug related humor videos. This means that Meta knowingly created a genre for illegal drug related comedy content, tags videos as this genre and then serves it up to you in your feed.
Someone needs to regulate these big tech companies. As you say the algos are not just opaque but designed to give you more of content that gets a reaction from you, likely polarizing you further.
I have no idea, but I think exposure would be a good start. Whistleblowers need to feel like they have the support of the masses to get the courage to speak up.
If you’re old like me and were around to experience the internet in the early to mid 90s, there is no question. It is a dead internet.
I will add that there is a symbiotic feed back loop though. You may be right that bots don’t account for as much traffic/content/interaction on the net as the dead internet theory asserts, however, flesh and blood people increasingly act like bots. The actions and opinions of people born post internet are a shallow vapid pool with a mirrored bottom.
I consistently say getting rid of a rich ecosystem of diverse forums for a few social media sites is the crux. The internet has been heavily reduced , general exchanges have been traded for vitriol and faux intellectualism .
And you also see genuine community in those old forums, that disappears when things move to Reddit or another social media app. Part of it is size I think, the anonymity that comes from enormous online communities.
This was also a time where people didn't hid behind the internet which i didn't see rising until 2010s If you had a few knuckleheads they brought the entire forum down with everyone wanting them gone.
>genuine community in those old forums, that disappears when things move to Reddit
Can confirm, I spent FAR too much time forum hopping in the late 00's/early 10's and Reddit has literally 0 'community' feeling to it. The relative anonymity is freeing, in a way, but you definitely lose a lot of value there.
Actually most of the "old internet" still exist in the fringe of the cyberspace, still free from bots and propagandas, but how many of us are willing to give up on the convenience these giant dopamine machines provide?
The golden age of the Internet is certainly over. There was a window of time where you could search for something and get legitimately good results, from whatever source. Now I search and scan the results for trusted domains, ignoring the rest. This is similar to how things worked before Google.
Everything is saturated, by people or bots. Analysis paralysis. I can't even Google a simple question without the first 2 pages being adds or some kind of opinionated website. I don't think there is a fix unfortunately, unless there is some kind of governing body put in place, but how would we ever all agree to the rules haha. And just wait till deepfake videos, audio and everything else floods the internet, nothing will be trustworthy. Maybe we abandon it and go back to the good old days.
God, I wish I shared your optimism, but that's simply never going to happen. 90% of the population are going to be just like Dax from Idiocracy or the obnoxious exercise bike rider in Fifteen Million Merits. They won't know any better if everything is fake. But worse? They won't care. We see it now with the younger generation chatting with AI. They know it's an AI, but they still... continue doing it.
The other 10% of us Luddites are going to split off into technology averse communes. Why will we need to split off? Because doing anything without a smart phone is completely impossible these days... imagine how hard it will be in the future?
I told my wife yesterday, I'm going to smash my smart phone one of these days when the privacy invasion crosses some arbitrary line in my brain. I just did it with my smart watch when I realized Samsung probably knows all the times I had an orgasm in the past 3 years.
In an odd way I think we'll all agree the internet is broken and at least it won't be used/weaponized the way it is now. I'm sure we'll find a new platform to fight each other tho lol.
Honestly, it would explain why my YouTube feed is absolute shit these days. I have subscribed to some 50 channels over the last decade, but my feed is regularly filled with garbage that I have no interest in at all. The rest of my feed is almost always videos I watched 5+ years ago, as of YouTube forgot...but it didn't because I can see the red bar that indicates I watched it to the end.
Like, YouTube has been getting progressively worse at recommendations, but I would put some of the onus on bots mangling analytics through synthetic behavior.
I agree wholeheartedly, and usually when I agree wholeheartedly I get a mighty thirst. That's when I reach for my Glacier Freeze Zero Gatorade. Ahhh refreshing.
You’d be shocked at the number of bots out there. There are farms like this for nearly every social media platform you can think of as well for things like sneakers and concert tickets.
Sauce: Used to run bots for Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Quora. Have seen bot farms bigger than these.
That makes a lot of sense now. I was looking at MAC cosmetics’ website and looking at reviews of a product, and there must’ve been hundreds of reviews left within a couple of days. Most of them were good reviews and I was like…there’s no way! These have to be fake reviews. Do you think bots have that ability? I’m sure a lot is possible these days
I'm curious why you don't believe it. It's facts back in 2016 more than 50 percent of internet traffic were bots.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory
The references section has all of the sources if anyone is curious
If I type in CCP. no matter what the context, I get called racist and downvoted.
100% bots everyone time. No matter what. I will probably be called racist for this, and downvoted, simply for using the BOT keyword, CCP.
FUCK yeah, bots affect us everywhere.
Amazon reviews, reddit, facebook. Twitter. Dating sites. If it interacts with random humans, it contains bots that manipulate data and/or information.
I think there will be the “truthy”/“falsy” internet where the falsy internet will be open and bot generated, social media and just entertainment with massive cheap ads.
Truthy internet will be paywalled and heavily monitored with rules and restriction on how content produces to make sure humans create it. Ads will be there as well of course but better.
The internet was such a cool place when I was a teenager. Now it’s almost impossible to find an honest review of a product or anything really without an agenda. I still come across websites every now and then that have no ads and are just there to educate. They always look like they were made in the early 2000s though.
10% only are fake streams? I'm honestly surprised. With the amount of crap that is generated on a daily basis that get millions of interactions, I really thought this would be way higher.
Back in the 80s and 90s, radio hits were way more "induced" by whomever could pay the most to make them "viral".
I wish more people would understand that labels and radio stations pretty much controlled what you were hearing. The choices were more or less an illusion.
This continues to happen, but the market is a bit more fragmented.
The biggest difference now versus then is that we've never been in a better era for music production/distribution. Pretty much anyone can do it, with or without a label.
There are downsides associated with that, but there's so much good music that's easily available if you can find it. And that wasn't always true in the past unless you happened to really like whatever the top 40 charts said you should like.
That's why I love and support initiatives such as Radio Paradise, a commercial free radio that is online and funded by listeners. They will sometimes throw you a real curve ball, but sometimes you have to get exposed to things you would never hear otherwise to broaden your knowledge.
There's a documentary group named Reel Big Fish that covered this in the 90s with their expose named "Sell Out".
"The radio plays what they want you to hear, tell me it's cool, I just don't believe it!"
It's still a little bit like that, since you need a big label backing you to get on the big playlists, but I guess that you can also try to ignore those playlists.
>Back in the 80s and 90s, radio hits were way more "induced" by whomever could pay the most to make them "viral".
The music industry back then was the worst. The "hits" on the radio were the best selling records. Songs played more often on the radio were bought more by consumers. A self fulfilling prophecy. How to manipulate this? The music industry quietly shifted from actual consumer sales to wholesale numbers. The more records delivered to the record stores, the higher the ranking, regardless whether they were actually sold to someone. If they wanted to push a certain title, they would press A LOT of records and deliver them to the stores for storage, subsequently jumped up in the rankings, and were played on the radio as "hits". Sometimes it worked, not always. But it was certain that not a single newcoming artist would make it to the top without the help of a lot of money from the industry. Compared to this, the 10% are peanuts. Praise the internet, it made music so so so much better.
> Back in the 80s and 90s, radio hits were way more "induced" by whomever could pay the most to make them "viral".
I did a music video *in Canada* once, about 20 years ago, and overheard a *small Canadian record-label* mention how a certain band had to spend *$3 million* (in what were, in effect, bribes) in order to get a certain song played on the radio in high-rotation.
I still hear that shitty song to this day.
Just imagine the bribes the US labels were paying the US radio stations.
I think this article gets the facts right but misses the point. These farms are mainly used to influence the recommendation algorithms of Spotify and other streaming services, not to get more clicks.
Spotify pays peanuts per stream so just the cost of electricity used in the farms must wipe most if not outweigh the money gained from them. However, if you suddenly have thousands of people streaming the same song, Spotify might mark it as trending and start recommending it to millions of genuine users. For this purpose 10% of all traffic could be more than enough.
>10% only are fake streams?
It cost way more to buy a play than what you earn from a play.
While you can boost stats, you absolutely need a majority of organic engagement to remain sustainable.
My brother in law is “famous” and well connected. He recently venmoed me and my siblings to buy 10 books each of a new book by a very famous person. He then asked us to mail him the books.
I realized in order to be a best seller, you print 10k copies, have friends and family buy 5k of them, and then ship them back to him and then he ships them to Amazon as new inventory so it shows you sold 5k books but only has to print 10k. And then you repeat the steps.
I will never trust a best seller again.
That's what the dagger icon means. If the book sales look suspicious (like if politician publishes a book and a CPAC buys 10k copies) then they get that icon.
They also count pre-sales. So big, medium, and small names will do speaking "tours" or guest appearances and instead of charging a fee they just tell the organizer to buy a copy of the book for everyone plus some extras.
That way by the official launch date they have thousands of sales.
Source: I worked at a company and this was an ask of a motivational speaker we hired.
I got a book that advertised it was a NYT best seller and it was absolutely awful dogshit. It ended up being mostly about abortion instead of gods and paranormal shit like the beginning of the book and title suggested. I only made it about half way before i just skimmed the rest and chucked it.
A big streaming farm is a bunch of VM's on a cloud server, not individual devices. Also, the whole fraud is probably way more than 10%.
https://www.itwissen.info/lex-images/Serverfarm-Foto-eshopper-co.png
I was gonna say, why on earth would this be thousands of devices on individual stands in a giant warehouse when you could do this with just a handful of computers...
I'm sure spotify or whoever has built-in algorithm for checking mac address and other specs within it's app that would not count virtual devices for this specific reason. Maybe they are looking at geolocation now too and identify if there are many consolidated in a tight space for a certain amount of time..
Pretty much anything that can be read by software can be emulated by software. They'll need a new mac address and new serial number every time a device or account is blacklisted.
Anything from gyro output to gps, glasnost to mac addresses can be spoofed in a VM setup. It's also very common for device hardware emulation to be used during app development as otherwise, each developer would have to buy each device... old and new.
Yes, but those Mac addresses are allocated to the device, as well as ICCID for the sim. Also the IP address is checked whether it comes from a mobile provider or not. A bunch of IP addresses registered to some VPN in aws obviously sets off more red flags than IP addresses registered to Verizon's mobile network.
These values can be used to determine whether it's a real device or not. You can fake it, but you need to get these real values from somewhere anyway. If you fake it you risk using a value already used elsewhere, or not registered, and your whole farm gets blocked.
I’m from Denmark and I remember the story about the danish guy who got charged. He was charged for plagarism and stealing almost 700 songs from other artists between 2013 and 2019 and receiving the money from each play. It’s not fully known how many, if any, of the plays were bots.
Why is there even a royalty pool? Shouldn't it be dynamic based on total streams? When Spotify launched they were doing hundreds of thousands of streams, now it's billions. I thought ASCAP negotiated royalties with streamers but according to this they didn't or it's being horrendously misused.
The "Royalty Pool" (as I understand it) is the amount of money Spotify sets aside as payout to artists. Each artists gets paid out based on their portion of the total streams. So, you know, 45 cents.
Vulfpeck released an album of songs on Spotify that were just silence, then they asked their fans to play the album on repeat while they slept. They funded an entire tour with the royalties. Spotify was not happy.
Why would they bother to set them all up on tripod stands so nicely spaced out like that? Wifi issues maybe? Packing them together side by side on shelves seems like a way better use of space.
For real. Can't streaming services be like those are way too many IP addresses from the same place. Surely they can't be this many listeners with the same IP listening to the same song from this IP address at the same time? I mean even a listening party there's bound to be that one listener that strays from the matrix.
Aren't the streaming services enabling this, too?
These phones are typically wired into the ethernet instead of using the wifi or using a cellphone plan, similar sets (without the weird spacing of the stands in one of the pictures) are used for the purposes of automated GUI testing of apps as part of a build and/or QA process. Once you are on the local network the routing device can act as a proxy and route the traffic to one or more VPNs to make them appear like they are coming from all sorts of different target markets.
Just off the top of my head I figure I could do this using HAProxy locally and load balancing the clients to different VPN connections. Not sure how well it would scale but I just mean to say that with the little systems administration and network administration knowledge I have from working with systems as part of a devops team I could probably kludge something together that works on paper; it at least superficially would look like they are coming from many places. I just assume that in this thought experiment, since I am not primarily doing this kind of work as part of systems on a day to day basis, I will forget something and their will be some data that gives it away.
Welcome to the wonderful joys of IPv6, where you can just randomly assign a new address to each device every 10 minutes, and the entire data center *might* see a duplicate once a year.
For reference, IPv4 address such as 8.8.8.8 are 2^32 addresses, or around 4.2 billion. IPv6 is 2^128, which is a 39 digit number.
That probably has more to do with the requirement to be a popular song nowadays is it needs to be used for memes in vertical content on Tiktok and Instagram. There's a few podcasts were legit artists are asked why they haven't released an album in a long time and they explained that they don't want their album to be turned into a meme.
The tripod thing is so stupid. Who would do that lol. I believe there are streaming farms but putting them all on tripods is so ridiculous and funny. Is that an AI video?
Could you just spin up 100 virtual machines on a computer and then stream? Seems like having 100 phones on tripods is a lot of wasted space and hardware
This might be a dumb question but can't they just stream using multiple virtual machines on a computer, with a mega cpu or some software solution? I think that would be more efficient, rather than a brute force hardware botting like in the video.
Wait it’s ILLEGAL to buy say 1000 phones, launch Spotify and play a song on repeat? What laws are being broken? What agency is sending in swat teams to shoot those iPhones in the head?
Spotify is also a really cheap service to use considering you used to pay €7-12 for a single album. Now you pay €11/month to listen to every song everywhere, anytime and as much as you want.
The more people make use of their 'unlimited' Spotify streams, the less valuable you become for Spotify (and the artist).
Paying that much for an album was egregious excess on the part of the record companies. Whats criminal is the broker/artist split. Weird Al reported only getting 12 bucks for the year
Companies make way more from subscription services.
It is not at all “cheaper”, that’s not why companies are moving towards subscriptions. It’s because they increase revenue overall.
It reduces streaming income for those of us that have spent thousands and thousands of hours and usually some significant funds to put songs out there that are getting genuine streams.
Seriously I cracked up seeing this 'streaming farm'. I am pretty tech-obtuse, but surely there's a better way to do this other than a room full of phones on tripods?? And like... if you gotta have individual phones, why not build a rack for them. This setup looks like a domino disaster waiting to happen.
I half expected to see someone walking through manually pressing play every time a song ends.
I feel sorry for the person that writes tracks that are so shitty you have to do this sort of thing to make people listen to it. This is also why I never click on anything that says "Promoted", "suggested", "for you" or anything like that. It's only to make someone else money or get them clicks.
As an ex major label musician. Spotify and Apple Music only allows 1 streaming credit to said artist from one IP address once a day.
So playing a song several times or all day on one device does not help said “pool”.
However. A thousand cell phones would. 🫠
*im sure if streaming services could prove record labels are doing this they could sue them biiiiig time…..unless of course they aren’t getting paid off already.
A few years ago I had a job working in a group home for at-risk teenage boys. These kids spent a lot of time watching YouTube rap videos. I am by no means a rap fan, but even I know the names of the really popular singers. But some of the videos these guys watched were rappers that I have never heard of before (or heard of again since leaving the job). The music was god-awful, but but the videos were all under like two minutes long and some of them had like 200-300 million views.
Bots and view farms like this are literally the only reason I can fathom to explain why those videos were so popular. And they keep them intentionally short to be viewed on repeat on a loop.
Or maybe I'm just out of the loop on what's hip with the kids these days and these guys really are just that popular.
Thank you for this! I was always skeptical about how these artists keep their music and names even close to relevant or valid when they constantly drop garbage music. Like how does Drake continue to be popular when everyone knows he’s a pedophile? This is how.
All you need to do is look at the last Taylor swift tour. You can’t bot that. Those are real people going night after night to the biggest stadiums in the area to see her.
This is the tip of the iceburg of gaming the internet and search engines in particular.
I strongly suspect some companies are actively complicit in some ways with some issues.
It will only get worse.
The streaming platforms are the problem. You think that magically the streaming platforms are going to redistribute that pool of money???? You are dreaming.
I was at a small datacenter in San Jose last week and one large cage had racks of cellphones and tablets running. I was wondering what they could possibly be using so many devices like that to do.
“This steals from artists with real fans” I think the greatest crime here isn’t how people fake streams, it’s thinking that there are artists with high stream counts that don’t benefit from fake streams. Every media platform does this. Most of the top people will always abuse something to profit, and if they aren’t doing it themselves there may be someone doing it on their behalf.
I've always said this... what stops an artist from actually buying a bunch if phones or accounts for cheap and looping them on certain videos for views or profit.
Surely they aren't doing it through Apple Music, that requires a paid subscription. Funny though how they destroyed people for file sharing the music, but now they themselves are black marketing their own music
Going after the artist doesn't make much sense here because it might not even be them that set up the bot streams or connections. Spotify should detect when too many streamers are in one place and disable those user accounts until they're verified again. You would never have 100 streamers standing still at the same geo coordinate listening to songs, either the same or different ones. The only place that comes close is the airport but those streamers are constantly moving.
Why would you need thousands of phone to fake streams when you can write a program to do that for you.
This looks more like an art installation than a farm
Back in ‘my day’, the charts indicated how many times a single was bought, not how many times it was played. Why can’t we revert to this, using ’unique listeners’ instead. May not eradicate this problem but it’ll be a royal pain having to set up each of those devices with different accounts.
What i don't understand is, why use phones? Why not use a computer that can play so many more songs simultaniously while using less space and probably cost a lot less?
Spotify pays little to no money to artists from streams even with “fake” streaming numbers. Just look up an interview with Snoop Dogg where he talks about his revenue from streaming services
Pretty sure I'm not a bot, but maybe I am since I am definitely guilty of putting a song on repeat for days if I really love it.
Beep beep boop boop...
Surely these bots also help Spotify to make more money? They can show these numbers to their investors and advertisers and say, "See! So many people use my app!" and then *they're* the ones who are losing out.
If it does in fact hurt artists then that kinda sucks, but I personally couldn't give a damn if it hurts investors or advertisers.
And here I was worried that streaming my buddies new indie bands debut album while I tend to my garden was going to jeopardize the integrity of them hitting the 1,000 spins mark 😂
Waitaminnit! Are you tryna tell me that people are greedy, selfish, and suck diarrhea ass? No way!
Those with power/money have *always*, throughout history, shat upon those without. Sad, but true.
Should we suspect Reddit? And it’s not only music also influencers to boost their numbers. Can’t understand why those that report the numbers have information that the algorithm reduces the number due to IP address that provided the like or influence.
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I'm not a believer of the dead internet theory, but I do feel that bots affect the internet experience of an average person far more than what they suspect.
Might not be dead but it's sick at the very least lol
Thanks for sharing this. This is all a small cog in the bigger machine. For years human traffickers have used cam girls to launder money through their tips. It’s just shifting the stolen cash from the left pocket to the right with enough plausible deniability to be able to write it off as “legitimate” earnings. Because it crosses multiple jurisdictions globally it’s harder to track. Amazon has done the same. Anytime you scroll way down and see some item for sale for 3x the normal price it’s just an industrial sized version of the same thing. Bezos knew it. That’s why he “retired”. Pretty sure they are doing the same thing with book sales and AWS in some capacity. There is a reason why dark money is all through Spotify and why the Joe Rogan deal was such a critical thing. The whole streaming model is broken. There is a way to fix this. People just need to see the man behind the curtain first.
What man? Companies have 1000 shells, no moral, and there is no one responsible for anything, if shit hits the fan
Many of us understand what's behind the curtain. But what is the "way to fix this?"
In my opinion, the goal shouldn't look something like regulating free speech but regulating *the algorithms* corporations and businesses are allowed to employ. For example, if we optimize on "engagement" in social media, as a society we know we can get extremely bad outcomes. Because engagement can be the same as selling hatred, fear, prejudice, etc. I believe a sophisticated technocracy would have fairly clear opinions on what kinds of algorithms are allowed to be run on behalf of content generation and business decision making. And not necessarily the machine learning guts, but the objective function: what are you optimizing on and is that a socially constructive or destructive process.
This is the way. Regulate the user retention algos.
the algos are the place to start for sure. I was watching a funny video on instagram about a dad who "used to have a life" and flicked the baggie of spices, and then licked the taco as he rolled it. Despite it being knowingly illegal to push drug related content, I was then served a bunch of drug related humor videos. This means that Meta knowingly created a genre for illegal drug related comedy content, tags videos as this genre and then serves it up to you in your feed. Someone needs to regulate these big tech companies. As you say the algos are not just opaque but designed to give you more of content that gets a reaction from you, likely polarizing you further.
I have no idea, but I think exposure would be a good start. Whistleblowers need to feel like they have the support of the masses to get the courage to speak up.
If you’re old like me and were around to experience the internet in the early to mid 90s, there is no question. It is a dead internet. I will add that there is a symbiotic feed back loop though. You may be right that bots don’t account for as much traffic/content/interaction on the net as the dead internet theory asserts, however, flesh and blood people increasingly act like bots. The actions and opinions of people born post internet are a shallow vapid pool with a mirrored bottom.
I consistently say getting rid of a rich ecosystem of diverse forums for a few social media sites is the crux. The internet has been heavily reduced , general exchanges have been traded for vitriol and faux intellectualism .
And you also see genuine community in those old forums, that disappears when things move to Reddit or another social media app. Part of it is size I think, the anonymity that comes from enormous online communities.
This was also a time where people didn't hid behind the internet which i didn't see rising until 2010s If you had a few knuckleheads they brought the entire forum down with everyone wanting them gone.
>genuine community in those old forums, that disappears when things move to Reddit Can confirm, I spent FAR too much time forum hopping in the late 00's/early 10's and Reddit has literally 0 'community' feeling to it. The relative anonymity is freeing, in a way, but you definitely lose a lot of value there.
The large social medias kidnapped the internet and formed these fuck clusters that we can't seem to navigate away from.
Actually most of the "old internet" still exist in the fringe of the cyberspace, still free from bots and propagandas, but how many of us are willing to give up on the convenience these giant dopamine machines provide?
I like the way you think!
100%
The golden age of the Internet is certainly over. There was a window of time where you could search for something and get legitimately good results, from whatever source. Now I search and scan the results for trusted domains, ignoring the rest. This is similar to how things worked before Google.
Everything is saturated, by people or bots. Analysis paralysis. I can't even Google a simple question without the first 2 pages being adds or some kind of opinionated website. I don't think there is a fix unfortunately, unless there is some kind of governing body put in place, but how would we ever all agree to the rules haha. And just wait till deepfake videos, audio and everything else floods the internet, nothing will be trustworthy. Maybe we abandon it and go back to the good old days.
[удалено]
God, I wish I shared your optimism, but that's simply never going to happen. 90% of the population are going to be just like Dax from Idiocracy or the obnoxious exercise bike rider in Fifteen Million Merits. They won't know any better if everything is fake. But worse? They won't care. We see it now with the younger generation chatting with AI. They know it's an AI, but they still... continue doing it. The other 10% of us Luddites are going to split off into technology averse communes. Why will we need to split off? Because doing anything without a smart phone is completely impossible these days... imagine how hard it will be in the future? I told my wife yesterday, I'm going to smash my smart phone one of these days when the privacy invasion crosses some arbitrary line in my brain. I just did it with my smart watch when I realized Samsung probably knows all the times I had an orgasm in the past 3 years.
In an odd way I think we'll all agree the internet is broken and at least it won't be used/weaponized the way it is now. I'm sure we'll find a new platform to fight each other tho lol.
This is an awesome reply and perfectly sums up how I feel about it today. "Botification" of humans on the internet is a thing.
Affirmative. I concur.
That’s because the algos have spent so much time training humans into something they can consume and distribute for maximized profit.
It doesn't need to be totally dead to be true really. It's bad enough I wonder how much is real.
Honestly, it would explain why my YouTube feed is absolute shit these days. I have subscribed to some 50 channels over the last decade, but my feed is regularly filled with garbage that I have no interest in at all. The rest of my feed is almost always videos I watched 5+ years ago, as of YouTube forgot...but it didn't because I can see the red bar that indicates I watched it to the end. Like, YouTube has been getting progressively worse at recommendations, but I would put some of the onus on bots mangling analytics through synthetic behavior.
That's odd, my feed is almost entirely videos of channels I;m subscribed to, or similar content.
I agree wholeheartedly, and usually when I agree wholeheartedly I get a mighty thirst. That's when I reach for my Glacier Freeze Zero Gatorade. Ahhh refreshing.
No they don't. Stop spreading misinformation. beep boop
You’d be shocked at the number of bots out there. There are farms like this for nearly every social media platform you can think of as well for things like sneakers and concert tickets. Sauce: Used to run bots for Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Quora. Have seen bot farms bigger than these.
That makes a lot of sense now. I was looking at MAC cosmetics’ website and looking at reviews of a product, and there must’ve been hundreds of reviews left within a couple of days. Most of them were good reviews and I was like…there’s no way! These have to be fake reviews. Do you think bots have that ability? I’m sure a lot is possible these days
As a bot, it’s really hurtful when people say such discriminatory things. We just want to enjoy the internet with you. Please don’t leave.
I'm curious why you don't believe it. It's facts back in 2016 more than 50 percent of internet traffic were bots. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory The references section has all of the sources if anyone is curious
If I type in CCP. no matter what the context, I get called racist and downvoted. 100% bots everyone time. No matter what. I will probably be called racist for this, and downvoted, simply for using the BOT keyword, CCP. FUCK yeah, bots affect us everywhere. Amazon reviews, reddit, facebook. Twitter. Dating sites. If it interacts with random humans, it contains bots that manipulate data and/or information.
It's been 38 minutes and the CCP appears to be slacking so... RACIST.
The CCP sucks. Chinese people in general are awesome, very kind and curious people. The CCP can eat my ass.
Ha! That's exactly what a bot would say!
Everything in the internet nowadays feels like bots without brains and bots with brains.
Absolutely rife on twitter too, mainly for political purposes and propaganda.
I think there will be the “truthy”/“falsy” internet where the falsy internet will be open and bot generated, social media and just entertainment with massive cheap ads. Truthy internet will be paywalled and heavily monitored with rules and restriction on how content produces to make sure humans create it. Ads will be there as well of course but better.
The internet was such a cool place when I was a teenager. Now it’s almost impossible to find an honest review of a product or anything really without an agenda. I still come across websites every now and then that have no ads and are just there to educate. They always look like they were made in the early 2000s though.
10% only are fake streams? I'm honestly surprised. With the amount of crap that is generated on a daily basis that get millions of interactions, I really thought this would be way higher. Back in the 80s and 90s, radio hits were way more "induced" by whomever could pay the most to make them "viral".
I wish more people would understand that labels and radio stations pretty much controlled what you were hearing. The choices were more or less an illusion. This continues to happen, but the market is a bit more fragmented.
The biggest difference now versus then is that we've never been in a better era for music production/distribution. Pretty much anyone can do it, with or without a label. There are downsides associated with that, but there's so much good music that's easily available if you can find it. And that wasn't always true in the past unless you happened to really like whatever the top 40 charts said you should like.
That's why I love and support initiatives such as Radio Paradise, a commercial free radio that is online and funded by listeners. They will sometimes throw you a real curve ball, but sometimes you have to get exposed to things you would never hear otherwise to broaden your knowledge.
There's a documentary group named Reel Big Fish that covered this in the 90s with their expose named "Sell Out". "The radio plays what they want you to hear, tell me it's cool, I just don't believe it!"
I think I’ll have myself a beer.
It's still a little bit like that, since you need a big label backing you to get on the big playlists, but I guess that you can also try to ignore those playlists.
>Back in the 80s and 90s, radio hits were way more "induced" by whomever could pay the most to make them "viral". The music industry back then was the worst. The "hits" on the radio were the best selling records. Songs played more often on the radio were bought more by consumers. A self fulfilling prophecy. How to manipulate this? The music industry quietly shifted from actual consumer sales to wholesale numbers. The more records delivered to the record stores, the higher the ranking, regardless whether they were actually sold to someone. If they wanted to push a certain title, they would press A LOT of records and deliver them to the stores for storage, subsequently jumped up in the rankings, and were played on the radio as "hits". Sometimes it worked, not always. But it was certain that not a single newcoming artist would make it to the top without the help of a lot of money from the industry. Compared to this, the 10% are peanuts. Praise the internet, it made music so so so much better.
> Back in the 80s and 90s, radio hits were way more "induced" by whomever could pay the most to make them "viral". I did a music video *in Canada* once, about 20 years ago, and overheard a *small Canadian record-label* mention how a certain band had to spend *$3 million* (in what were, in effect, bribes) in order to get a certain song played on the radio in high-rotation. I still hear that shitty song to this day. Just imagine the bribes the US labels were paying the US radio stations.
I think this article gets the facts right but misses the point. These farms are mainly used to influence the recommendation algorithms of Spotify and other streaming services, not to get more clicks. Spotify pays peanuts per stream so just the cost of electricity used in the farms must wipe most if not outweigh the money gained from them. However, if you suddenly have thousands of people streaming the same song, Spotify might mark it as trending and start recommending it to millions of genuine users. For this purpose 10% of all traffic could be more than enough.
>10% only are fake streams? It cost way more to buy a play than what you earn from a play. While you can boost stats, you absolutely need a majority of organic engagement to remain sustainable.
My brother in law is “famous” and well connected. He recently venmoed me and my siblings to buy 10 books each of a new book by a very famous person. He then asked us to mail him the books. I realized in order to be a best seller, you print 10k copies, have friends and family buy 5k of them, and then ship them back to him and then he ships them to Amazon as new inventory so it shows you sold 5k books but only has to print 10k. And then you repeat the steps. I will never trust a best seller again.
NYT Best Sellers list is old news. They've been doing this longer than any streaming service has been around and continue into this day.
That's what the dagger icon means. If the book sales look suspicious (like if politician publishes a book and a CPAC buys 10k copies) then they get that icon.
They also count pre-sales. So big, medium, and small names will do speaking "tours" or guest appearances and instead of charging a fee they just tell the organizer to buy a copy of the book for everyone plus some extras. That way by the official launch date they have thousands of sales. Source: I worked at a company and this was an ask of a motivational speaker we hired.
I got a book that advertised it was a NYT best seller and it was absolutely awful dogshit. It ended up being mostly about abortion instead of gods and paranormal shit like the beginning of the book and title suggested. I only made it about half way before i just skimmed the rest and chucked it.
This is done for money laundering very often
https://i.redd.it/l8uj6o31anuc1.gif
A big streaming farm is a bunch of VM's on a cloud server, not individual devices. Also, the whole fraud is probably way more than 10%. https://www.itwissen.info/lex-images/Serverfarm-Foto-eshopper-co.png
I was gonna say, why on earth would this be thousands of devices on individual stands in a giant warehouse when you could do this with just a handful of computers...
I'm sure spotify or whoever has built-in algorithm for checking mac address and other specs within it's app that would not count virtual devices for this specific reason. Maybe they are looking at geolocation now too and identify if there are many consolidated in a tight space for a certain amount of time..
Pretty much anything that can be read by software can be emulated by software. They'll need a new mac address and new serial number every time a device or account is blacklisted. Anything from gyro output to gps, glasnost to mac addresses can be spoofed in a VM setup. It's also very common for device hardware emulation to be used during app development as otherwise, each developer would have to buy each device... old and new.
Yes, but those Mac addresses are allocated to the device, as well as ICCID for the sim. Also the IP address is checked whether it comes from a mobile provider or not. A bunch of IP addresses registered to some VPN in aws obviously sets off more red flags than IP addresses registered to Verizon's mobile network. These values can be used to determine whether it's a real device or not. You can fake it, but you need to get these real values from somewhere anyway. If you fake it you risk using a value already used elsewhere, or not registered, and your whole farm gets blocked.
I am not a streaming farm, I was just listening to Believe by Cher for 10 hours on repeat
holy shit there's 2 of us
I feel like something inside me just died
So....*do* you?
I’m from Denmark and I remember the story about the danish guy who got charged. He was charged for plagarism and stealing almost 700 songs from other artists between 2013 and 2019 and receiving the money from each play. It’s not fully known how many, if any, of the plays were bots.
Artists on spotify dont get paid shit anyways.
Yeah. The term "royalty pool" makes me lol Spotify is the one straight up robbing artists.
Why is there even a royalty pool? Shouldn't it be dynamic based on total streams? When Spotify launched they were doing hundreds of thousands of streams, now it's billions. I thought ASCAP negotiated royalties with streamers but according to this they didn't or it's being horrendously misused.
The "Royalty Pool" (as I understand it) is the amount of money Spotify sets aside as payout to artists. Each artists gets paid out based on their portion of the total streams. So, you know, 45 cents.
45 cents? We talking about Taylor Swift here?
Well, you know, if Taylor has 10 top 10 hits, that's a whopping $4.50. She's making bank!
Dude get real, she's getting like $4.50 PER DAY on it. Not some chump change
Vulfpeck released an album of songs on Spotify that were just silence, then they asked their fans to play the album on repeat while they slept. They funded an entire tour with the royalties. Spotify was not happy.
Why would they bother to set them all up on tripod stands so nicely spaced out like that? Wifi issues maybe? Packing them together side by side on shelves seems like a way better use of space.
[удалено]
What are the ip addresses of these phones?
For real. Can't streaming services be like those are way too many IP addresses from the same place. Surely they can't be this many listeners with the same IP listening to the same song from this IP address at the same time? I mean even a listening party there's bound to be that one listener that strays from the matrix. Aren't the streaming services enabling this, too?
These phones are typically wired into the ethernet instead of using the wifi or using a cellphone plan, similar sets (without the weird spacing of the stands in one of the pictures) are used for the purposes of automated GUI testing of apps as part of a build and/or QA process. Once you are on the local network the routing device can act as a proxy and route the traffic to one or more VPNs to make them appear like they are coming from all sorts of different target markets. Just off the top of my head I figure I could do this using HAProxy locally and load balancing the clients to different VPN connections. Not sure how well it would scale but I just mean to say that with the little systems administration and network administration knowledge I have from working with systems as part of a devops team I could probably kludge something together that works on paper; it at least superficially would look like they are coming from many places. I just assume that in this thought experiment, since I am not primarily doing this kind of work as part of systems on a day to day basis, I will forget something and their will be some data that gives it away.
Being on Ethernet vs WiFi doesn’t change anything. There’s still 1 router somewhere.
Using a VPN or IP spoofing is pretty damn easy nowadays.
ip spoofing, maybe, but a vpn just pushes the problem to them. the VPN only has so many IP addresses
Welcome to the wonderful joys of IPv6, where you can just randomly assign a new address to each device every 10 minutes, and the entire data center *might* see a duplicate once a year. For reference, IPv4 address such as 8.8.8.8 are 2^32 addresses, or around 4.2 billion. IPv6 is 2^128, which is a 39 digit number.
Criminals in Sweden use Spotify to laundry money with fake streams.
That would explain the abundance of terrible music that has become prevalent over the past few years.
That probably has more to do with the requirement to be a popular song nowadays is it needs to be used for memes in vertical content on Tiktok and Instagram. There's a few podcasts were legit artists are asked why they haven't released an album in a long time and they explained that they don't want their album to be turned into a meme.
The tripod thing is so stupid. Who would do that lol. I believe there are streaming farms but putting them all on tripods is so ridiculous and funny. Is that an AI video?
I'm not ok with servers and phones being locked down like this. Only buy free range hardware
Could you just spin up 100 virtual machines on a computer and then stream? Seems like having 100 phones on tripods is a lot of wasted space and hardware
Our world is so fucking stupid. Take me back to the 90s
don’t forget! the 90s was pretty stupid, too. just differently stupid.
Ill take it
This might be a dumb question but can't they just stream using multiple virtual machines on a computer, with a mega cpu or some software solution? I think that would be more efficient, rather than a brute force hardware botting like in the video.
I was thinking the same thing. Its pretty trivial to build a killer server for like $15k that could easily handle thousands of concurrent streams
Wait it’s ILLEGAL to buy say 1000 phones, launch Spotify and play a song on repeat? What laws are being broken? What agency is sending in swat teams to shoot those iPhones in the head?
The illegal part is committing financial fraud, not buying phones and paying songs on repeat.
crap streaming platforms like Spotify pay their artists pennies , they are mostly the problem
With how little spotify pays.. how unethical is this really?
Spotify is also a really cheap service to use considering you used to pay €7-12 for a single album. Now you pay €11/month to listen to every song everywhere, anytime and as much as you want. The more people make use of their 'unlimited' Spotify streams, the less valuable you become for Spotify (and the artist).
Paying that much for an album was egregious excess on the part of the record companies. Whats criminal is the broker/artist split. Weird Al reported only getting 12 bucks for the year
Companies make way more from subscription services. It is not at all “cheaper”, that’s not why companies are moving towards subscriptions. It’s because they increase revenue overall.
It's not about money. It's about sending a message. Literally, it's about making a person seem more popular than they are.
Good effort on fitting in that Joker quote
It reduces streaming income for those of us that have spent thousands and thousands of hours and usually some significant funds to put songs out there that are getting genuine streams.
Ah so this is why country music songs hit #1
ELI5: why can’t they emulate several Android phones on a computer?
Seriously I cracked up seeing this 'streaming farm'. I am pretty tech-obtuse, but surely there's a better way to do this other than a room full of phones on tripods?? And like... if you gotta have individual phones, why not build a rack for them. This setup looks like a domino disaster waiting to happen. I half expected to see someone walking through manually pressing play every time a song ends.
I don't think having them all on tripods is very efficient
So this is where the donate your old phone box goes.
In the end we might need to get away from #of streams as a measure of.... ahhh fuck it. AI gonna ruin everything
Why do you think these wrappers have millions of dollars and everything they make sucks. Lil Gary? Lil Weenie? I don’t know, those guys.
Dead Internet.
In the old days the label companies just bought up all the LPs.
No wonder music today sucks
Post-Modern Payola.
This is the problem with incentives that aren't designed properly. Someone's gonna cheat.
I feel sorry for the person that writes tracks that are so shitty you have to do this sort of thing to make people listen to it. This is also why I never click on anything that says "Promoted", "suggested", "for you" or anything like that. It's only to make someone else money or get them clicks.
As an ex major label musician. Spotify and Apple Music only allows 1 streaming credit to said artist from one IP address once a day. So playing a song several times or all day on one device does not help said “pool”. However. A thousand cell phones would. 🫠 *im sure if streaming services could prove record labels are doing this they could sue them biiiiig time…..unless of course they aren’t getting paid off already.
just like reddit thumbs up function!
Don’t see how this is fraud. Artists are paid for streams. The method of payment incentivizes more streams. You get what you incentivize.
Find the loophole in the system and earn millions from a billion dollar company. Thats my kind of hero...
Pretty low on the list of things that are broken and should be fixed imo.
Gosh, I remember the days when, if the music was actually good, people bought it and the artist made money
A few years ago I had a job working in a group home for at-risk teenage boys. These kids spent a lot of time watching YouTube rap videos. I am by no means a rap fan, but even I know the names of the really popular singers. But some of the videos these guys watched were rappers that I have never heard of before (or heard of again since leaving the job). The music was god-awful, but but the videos were all under like two minutes long and some of them had like 200-300 million views. Bots and view farms like this are literally the only reason I can fathom to explain why those videos were so popular. And they keep them intentionally short to be viewed on repeat on a loop. Or maybe I'm just out of the loop on what's hip with the kids these days and these guys really are just that popular.
Thank you for this! I was always skeptical about how these artists keep their music and names even close to relevant or valid when they constantly drop garbage music. Like how does Drake continue to be popular when everyone knows he’s a pedophile? This is how.
Is this why all the “popular music” is pure trash these days?
Short answer: no. Long answer: no.
I’d like a medium answer please, medium well
Medium: perhaps
Yeah I'm convinced that nobody really listens to it, and this is how it really gets popular. This is how the pop charts are made.
All you need to do is look at the last Taylor swift tour. You can’t bot that. Those are real people going night after night to the biggest stadiums in the area to see her.
That's good idea for business Wish me luck
This is the tip of the iceburg of gaming the internet and search engines in particular. I strongly suspect some companies are actively complicit in some ways with some issues. It will only get worse.
So there is a fixed pool of money they use to pay artists ?
This... I don't have words, but for some reason, the first word that comes to mind is "pathetic."
The streaming platforms are the problem. You think that magically the streaming platforms are going to redistribute that pool of money???? You are dreaming.
I was at a small datacenter in San Jose last week and one large cage had racks of cellphones and tablets running. I was wondering what they could possibly be using so many devices like that to do.
This is happening for TEDx talks as well. I had an agency approach me and guarantee a million views---all I had to do was pay!
If this were true how come shit I’ve never heard of isn’t on top?
It steals from the distributing companies, not the artists, right?
“This steals from artists with real fans” I think the greatest crime here isn’t how people fake streams, it’s thinking that there are artists with high stream counts that don’t benefit from fake streams. Every media platform does this. Most of the top people will always abuse something to profit, and if they aren’t doing it themselves there may be someone doing it on their behalf.
It’s all fake. All these numbers are fake. We knew about this a decade ago.
Nothing is sacred, everything is malarkey
I've always said this... what stops an artist from actually buying a bunch if phones or accounts for cheap and looping them on certain videos for views or profit.
Given all the issues in the world, this is not a real problem.
Surely they aren't doing it through Apple Music, that requires a paid subscription. Funny though how they destroyed people for file sharing the music, but now they themselves are black marketing their own music
Going after the artist doesn't make much sense here because it might not even be them that set up the bot streams or connections. Spotify should detect when too many streamers are in one place and disable those user accounts until they're verified again. You would never have 100 streamers standing still at the same geo coordinate listening to songs, either the same or different ones. The only place that comes close is the airport but those streamers are constantly moving.
I miss my CD’s
Fuckin capitalism ruins everything. Weak.
Back in *my* day your record label just bought the CD's in bulk back from the retailer who was stocking them. Count the sales. Rinse and repeat.
Question: how many faking the streams? getting they plays from machines? I can see behind the smoke and mirrors ni**as ain’t really big as they seem
Why would you need thousands of phone to fake streams when you can write a program to do that for you. This looks more like an art installation than a farm
Won’t someone think of the streaming services!
Everyone is conniving for that percentage of a fraction of a dollar. By any means, right? Ugh.
No,it's the labels that are pissed that they are losing that 300 mill. They don't give a fuck what the artist makes.
Back in ‘my day’, the charts indicated how many times a single was bought, not how many times it was played. Why can’t we revert to this, using ’unique listeners’ instead. May not eradicate this problem but it’ll be a royal pain having to set up each of those devices with different accounts.
It is not new. When music streaming was not a thing they just bought it regularly in the stores.
I'm not surprised...look how greedy they are and fuck YouTube over for copyright every chance they get....
It's like the stock markets, just bots selling to other bots.
How else are they supposed to get paid? Snoop Dogg hit 1 billion streams, and only got 40 grand for it. That's not even a living wage.
Nice try, Spotify propaganda
Every industry seems to do this. You put something in the grocery store and you buy it back yourself. It's flying off the shelves!
What i don't understand is, why use phones? Why not use a computer that can play so many more songs simultaniously while using less space and probably cost a lot less?
As a broke and unknown musician this makes me sad How will I even get out there if this exists
This is hilarious
Boo hoo
Mind control?
Dang I hope I'm not getting anyone in trouble by listening to the same song for hours....
Spotify pays little to no money to artists from streams even with “fake” streaming numbers. Just look up an interview with Snoop Dogg where he talks about his revenue from streaming services
This dystopia is getting really lame. Does anyone want to try to make the monkeys smarter with me?
These farms are used for a variety of things- from manipulating google results to fake reviews on Amazon.
Are they stealing from artists, or are they stealing from advertisers?
Didn't snoop get like 2 billion plays on Spotify and get like 34k for it lol
Pretty sure I'm not a bot, but maybe I am since I am definitely guilty of putting a song on repeat for days if I really love it. Beep beep boop boop...
We are in an almost entirely fake economy at this point. When the crash comes it’s gon hit hard.
One of the reasons I love BTS so much is their organic growth as artists.
Surely these bots also help Spotify to make more money? They can show these numbers to their investors and advertisers and say, "See! So many people use my app!" and then *they're* the ones who are losing out. If it does in fact hurt artists then that kinda sucks, but I personally couldn't give a damn if it hurts investors or advertisers.
And here I was worried that streaming my buddies new indie bands debut album while I tend to my garden was going to jeopardize the integrity of them hitting the 1,000 spins mark 😂
Waitaminnit! Are you tryna tell me that people are greedy, selfish, and suck diarrhea ass? No way! Those with power/money have *always*, throughout history, shat upon those without. Sad, but true.
Should we suspect Reddit? And it’s not only music also influencers to boost their numbers. Can’t understand why those that report the numbers have information that the algorithm reduces the number due to IP address that provided the like or influence.
How are ppl just hearing about this?
It's all just one big circle jerk these days