Topic: [EXPERIMENT] Testing the Limits of Shitposting (Read 1280 times)

Timely bump.

I'm not doing that, thanks for asking.. I have much better things to do.. What about you?.. (I know you're probably not either)


Haha no kidding.. Well that goes to show it's much less time intensive than many believe it is/much easier than many are led to believe.

I live in EU country, and minimal hourly wage here is about $4. 1 hour of intensive spamming would bring same earnings as you would do dirty jobs in factory for 2 days. I'm not even talking about third world countries - you can become rich and earn for a fancy living just by spamming here without putting any effort. No surprise that therevare so many people who are "working" full time on Bitcointalk instead of going to common job.

This is not a day expense in a third world country, but its an expense of a month according to World Data.

Up to $62 an hour income could be a monthly income for these countries > Ethiopia, Afghanistan, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Madagascar

 

Your 3-parameter combination looks good, but it will lead to nothing.
- campaigns run by companies that decide their requirements (merit requirements), not the forum (so far).
- if there is no demotions on old generations, your tool will not make sense.
It might  be better if account's profile page provides some information on each account, total posts, post per day rate.
Like this:

I don't know that the new forum software will include this one or not.

Your posts are still far better than the average spammer who hasn't earned any Merit. As I wrote from my Mobile:
If I remember correctly, there are about 10,000 high-ranking accounts, most of which hasn't earned a single Merit. Without plagiarism it takes a lot of time to get them banned for spamming and have them run out of accounts.

---

---

I had another idea: I can create an ignore list with certain criteria: All accounts that created more than X posts in the past Y days and earned less than Z Merit will be added. Say X=50, Y=30 and Z=2, or X=200, Y=180 and Z=1. Criteria can be adjusted as needed, and this list can also be used to report spammers.
Is anyone interested in such a list?

This was probably your rate limiting factor - reading the last post or two and responding directly to them. As we know, spammers don't continue the flow of the conversation, and rarely even read the last few posts. Hell, some don't even read the OP. They just see the title and throw together any generic nonsense.

I reckon you could probably reach 100/hour if you just picked a random keyboard out of the thread's title (like "China", "volume", "Satoshi", "adoption", etc.) and made any sentence containing that word. As a small experiment, I typed the following off the top of my head, and it took me 75 seconds:


Obviously you have to factor in a few seconds to open each thread, type, hit post, and move on, but I think 100/hour is definitely doable when you stop caring at all about meaning or logical progression of the thread.

Look like lot of account are going to wake up and maybe we  see some movement in account selling market too.
Might be few are interested now to pay their long overdue loans to get their account back or trust removed.

I actually took my time on certain posts. The hour went by quicker than I thought: the experiential time felt like 20 minutes.

---

The waittime caps at 4 seconds. That would mean a maximum of 900 posts/hr, if we're neglecting connection times.

---

The strategy that I picked:

1) Open Economics, Speculation, Gambling discussion and Bitcoin Discussion.

2) Open all of the last-post links in a new tab.

3) Write on easy threads. Respond if it helps in the ease of the post. Otherwise make some random generic shit up.

This is really crazy, you did a great try also as I see most of the post were atleast upto the mark to be paid from a campaign perspective. I am getting what you feel after this big mind trigger by posting this ammout of posts in an hour. I am guessing it feels the same to the spammers who are operating multiple accounts to post daily or shitpost daily.

---

Yaa, 100 was pretty much an higher goal, but one post per minute is not easy task too. Your efforts would surely help in shitposting analysis.

Good Job and Nice Try !

Out of curiosity, how many accounts are you posting from with their signature?

Not to mention: those could be alts replying to each other.. One of them has such bullshit green trust (sending steem codes first makes your trustworthy? Acting for an escrow of what could be your own business makes youm trustworthy? double "very honest man" trust?). Let's keep reporting. Mods are going to have a huge backlog of reports in the coming days/weeks..

They are now starting making the flood of posts in the entire forum, they are thinking more posts made more profit to generate.
Hopefully, they should know this rule.

How long do I need to wait between forum posts?
Waiting time between forum posts is calculated with the following formula:

60 posts in just 1 hour are impossible.

It's pretty good - but the rate at which you need to be posting to reach this.. You'll go mad in a couple days..

@actmyname did you have these posts "pre-prepared" / ready? (1 post a minute is insanity..)

They started to spam the [LEARN] BBCode Lessons & Tutorials [+tutorial videos!] thread.  By now, we can see Yobit everywhere in the forum, what we have not seen is its campaign's manager.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1727100.180

---

Even 60 posts per hour is likely unreachable because you have to do lots of things simultaneously, click on thread to open it, click on reply button to open reply thread, and then type some words, before clicking on Save button to publish your post. The cycle will cost more than 2 minutes for each two consecutive posts. It is only reachable (but I doubt it is unreachable) if you open all threads > open all reply tab > type all contents > Start to count down before Clicking on the  Save button from first post to your 60th or 100th post. Yes, you can hit 60 posts (even 100 posts) per hour.

$30 or $60 an hour is actually pretty good in first world countries. In third world countries, this is enough for a days expenses.

I’ve already started to see posts that clearly don’t know what they are talking about and/or clearly haven’t read much more than the thread title.

You've just made a Bitcointalk record, 59 posts/Hour is absolutely unbreakable unless like o_e_l_e_o said they already save their replies from drafts or notepads, it would be easy for them to get 100/hour. I think this time the staff should really make a move not only because of spammers at the same time these guys are promoting a dishonest exchange site, like most of its users says there is some strange happening with their wallets some of their coins are missing. to stop them from getting more victims, let's not support this kind of act and report these abusers as soon as they violated the rules.

I think you might be right. There were some instances where I was removing the spaces from quotes (habit) to save space even though it consumed extra time.

If I ever do this again (99% chance I definitely will not) I'll have to train myself out of those 'good habits'. Additionally, I kept using large words that would slow down my progress. If you look through the archives you'll see what I'm talking about.

(Should have kept going "the bitcoin and the price are rising but we cannot do the functional prediction because volatility and variability")

You are crazy!

You made 60 posts in an hour by maintaining post quality... However, it is proven that you are able to make 100 posts an hour if you don't care about the quality.

Experiment Succeeded IMO.

I mean 60 posts in one hour isn't bad! That's enough to get you 0.0072 BTC if you had 3 Sr. Member accounts.

( 0.0072 BTC from the YoBit campaign. )

Holy fucking shit. I don't ever want to do that again. What an absolute nightmare, I tell you.

Yeah, 100 posts was way too ambitious. But this data will be great for analysis!

Yeah, he has managed to get 44 posts in 46 minutes as we speak..
They are not essay material but are much better than 90% of the shit out there
I even feel tempted to throw some merit :PPP

But 100/h, that ain't gonna happen unless he goes fully shitpost

They need a decent Exchange, with decent support, with a decent account on the forum, not the one they have with 130 negative trusts. The signature manager is the las decent shit they have to worry about, LMAO.

And about op, the experiment sounds nice, but i don't think 100 posts/hour is possible. That's almost 2 post/min. But good luck.

Talking about shitposting, how is this for a world record: 21 posts in 25 minutes?   Plot twist, dude doesn't even have the required rank to join their campaign (he a member).

https://bitcointalksearch.org/user/x2team2017-678034

The type of posts he has made (btw, reported for burst posting):


Here is an avatar for every YoShit supporter out there, it is mandatory, you have to wear it.



image source: yoshit official twitter account

Please share some of the posting magic pills with me. I struggle to make 8 on topic posts per day to reach my daily quota. TIA! 
3 rounds ended for my sig. campaign and I never reached 55 post limits in a single week.


I mentioned this Yoshit Spammer in this thread, and when I was reading his posts, believe or not I was impressed enough with his posts, A VERY HIGH QUALITY SHITPOSTER.

Then I took a break for some time to calculate how much he will be earning from Yoshit Campaign without any effort. Need to scan the forum for this type of posters and need to make a list for future reference.

YoBit signature campaign is a sign that the bull market is coming:

We should all join there "to make things work as fast as possible" and bring BTC to a new ATH very soon. Exchange signatures are always a sign of growing bubbles, especially if high ranked-members are involved in the campaign (they can't be wrong - or is it just because of the payment?).

Is there a way to track what signature banned users had before getting banned?
I know the sig is removed once you get banned but I remember somebody had some sort of way to figure this out when the stake campaign started to attract unwanted attention and was number one there

LE:


Yeah, imagine MtGox or Bitcoinica starting a campaign.....Mooon!!!!!!

[tinfoil]Perhaps the Yobit campaign is a false flag operation designed to smoke out dormant shitposters[/tinfoil]

Relax guys, there's no such thing as high-ranking accounts shitposting like newbies...according to Saint-loup. 


Also, look at the bright side, the thought of how many alts/plagiarists/ban-evaders (that have been idle for a while) will be caught/tagged and banned warms my heart.

And it's a shame that all of them are Sr. Member or above, they are posting like Newbie shitposters. Only because they were here before Merit was introduced. 

Maybe we should consider a deMerit for wearing a (paid) signature (at least 1 deMerit per month). For wearing a paid signature everyone has to register his account as "enrolled in a paid signature" where he has to tick a checkbox in his profile settings and that will result in 1 deMerit per month. If someone is caught wearing a paid signature and hasn't enabled his account as "enrolled in a paid signature" => red trust

It will take a time to rank their accounts down but I think it's the only possibility to reduce such shitshows at least a little bit.

Of course it is possible, you can probably skip word or two and post shortest post in history of bitcointalk. May the mtmitat be with you:

And, my favorite:
Sorry, not that one. This one:

In order for a company to be blacklisted from advertising they would need to enroll in a signature subscription (with confirmation by the advertiser) service by the forum so to prevent someone from enrolling a bunch of accounts to wear a company's signature to create a bunch of shit posts and get the company banned from advertising.

The threshold for blacklisting from advertising on the forum would be very high. It currently takes a lot for a person to get banned, even temporally for having insubstantial posts with a paid signature, and bans are generally only handed out after a sustained negative behavior and after a number of warnings (often in the form of deleted posts) are given out. The time required to have someone blacklisted would likely be a minimum of multiple months so that a company can evaluate performance and take corrective action.

I do agree we should continue to punish spammers in the form of posting bans, and perhaps signature bans (and perhaps incrementally diminished signature abilities).

---

Which is exactly what's happening here: something that I've feared. High-count low-effort campaigns that induce spam, hosted off-forum.
[/quote]I think this is one result of the long-term systemic abuse abuse of the trust system via the leaving of negative ratings for reasons other than someone reasonably being a scammer. There are a number of by all accounts, legitimately running businesses that have negative trust on bitcointalk, and do not have much to lose by running a signature campaign that spams this place up. Although in this case the rating may be justified.

I'm going to time the writing of an example. The goal is improbable but that's why I set it there. An easy goal means a lack of pressure.

---

(25 second timer so that I can ensure enough time to find a thread, quickly read the title and last post and formulate a response in my mind)

I'll be using this as an example thread: Buy every dip!

Reply is below:

---

It's obvious that the idea of buying every dip makes sense. But the reality is that we don't exactly know when that "dip" hits. I think it's inane to tell people to "buy low sell high" when they can't predict the markets.

---

(came right off the top of my head by recalling all the general nonsense that's written)

So okay, maybe one post per minute for three-liners (spammers typically choose this) using newlines for padding will work better. Regardless, it'll make for an interesting experiment.

I highly doubt that it's doable without some the pre-existing text to play with, notice that you need to a post every 36 seconds and that is more than enough to actually just post but the hard  part will be finding WHERE to post.

you need to stay on-topic somehow ( you can't afford to risk your posts being reported for being off-topic ), so even with copy-paste you can't paste something like "thank you sir for the nice project, i am sure this ICO will be successful" in say a thread in Reputation.


Therefore to be able to post at that rate you will need the following.

1- A list of all the threads you going to use.

2- A good portion of what you plan to type ready to be copied and pasted.


on a human-only level i highly doubt you can achieve that rate without at least 1 of the two points, however , going on semi-automated / fully/automated method, you can certainly achieve much "better  " results.


however, Shitposting does not have to be this efficient, i think i personally can do up to 20 "acceptable" posts per hour , so if if i have 5 hours a day i can do 100 posts a day ( i won't do that   ).

Even when you can do it, I don't think you should do it. Instead, if you can, you should scrap data to count how many posts published by Yobit supporters are one line shit posts, and how many percentage one line shit posts per total posts published by Yobit supporters.

Assuming I average 110 wpm == 550 cpm, I can probably make at least one post per minute.

---

Just did a few to practice. Should be good enough to hit at least 60 posts/hour.

At current YoBit rates, assuming Sr. Member accounts only, that would be 0.0072 BTC == $38/hr. That grows to $64/hr with Legendary accounts.

If we assume that the account farmers only have Sr. Member accounts (they require 3 per hour) then you would need 24 for an 8-hour work day. (give or take an hour)

---

---

Ah, yes. The ever-so-frequent post-padding that spammers decide to insert into their posts to obfuscate the very fact that they are just rambling with the same nonsensical bullshit that is ingrained into their mind after countless hours of frequenting the forum and posting the same vapid and generic replies to posts which that quote thereof and will do the same routine of agree and expand or rephrase in a different way, without adding any extra content.

See how easy it is? That took less than a minute to type, I believe.

Completely agree with you here, but don't understand the logic behind it at all. Bitcoin Discussion should be the main discussion board on the forum, which, after all, is called bitcointalk. As it stands, it's barely usable. Many smart and experienced users don't even visit it, and the few that do are rapidly drowned out by endless amounts of spam. I've reported thousands of posts on it in the last few months, but every day it just fills up again more rapidly than can be dealt with. Given that insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results, I'm going to have to take a break from reporting for the sake of my own sanity.

I don't think it's beyond redemption, however, by any means. It could be cleaned up quite rapidly, but we need some top down changes. Several mods dedicated just for that board (most boards could benefit from this). Higher merit requirements to display signatures, applicable to all ranks. More liberal bans for repeat spammers. Those three changes would remove the incentive to spam, get rid of the users who continue anyway, and prevent necrobumping and useless threads before they gain traction and turn in to yet another spam megathread.

Ok fair enough, thanks for the correction - I had never realised that.. I will refresh myself on forum rules..

Good luck with the testing, it'll be fairly rapid to fake the "constructive" replies - just expand, expand, expand.. Especially useful threads for that are the "who is your bitcoin heir" type threads (yes, that's in Bitcoin discussion currently, I quickly looked for an example...). Isn't that more off-topic semi-random discussion? Could there be an off-topic-but-related section somehow?

Those two sections are beyond redemption anyway and can't be shat upon any more than they are already.  The Yobit participants could still make constructive posts and hit the maximum amount allowed per day by the campaign, but I'm not optimistic about that actually happening.  If the shitposts stay mainly in those two sections, the damage will be somewhat contained at least.  I hate that Bitcoin Discussion has become a spam section, because it should be where all the good threads get created, but whatever.  Theymos is OK with it, so I won't fret.

Me too, and I'd imagine it's going to be damn hard to catch all of them.  Yobit really should tighten up their campaign standards.

Good luck with your extra-super-scientific experimenty thing, actmyname.  Let me know which journal you're going to publish the results in.

I do not think 100 post in a hour is also too much  for a shitposter too.You need a bot for this
I am wondering if some new service like "Yobit post making" services open up. 

I also expect to see a lot plagiarized post with lot of low quality post.

The metric is really to form a kind of idea on how many posts I can make under the context of "barely-passable" or "sufficient" post quality. If you take a look at a large portion of signatured posts, you'll understand what I'm talking about.

---

I don't think I've done it too often recently: maybe twice outside of this thread. Doesn't really matter to me what others may perceive as "posting for money". Those that know me should know (to some degree) that I don't just mindlessly post to hit the cap every week. I also trust in DS's ability to not tick a single line "Reserved" post as qualified.

---

Which is exactly what's happening here: something that I've feared. High-count low-effort campaigns that induce spam, hosted off-forum.

Fair point. How about blacklisting then, as explained in the post I linked to above. If YoBit don't clean up their act, then YoBit as an entity will be banned from advertising on the forum. I still think we should be handing out escalating bans to the individual spammers though.


I think this would work great with the blacklisting idea. If your campaign has x number of posts deleted for spam, or x number of users banned for spamming, in y number of days/weeks, you get a warning. Repeat offending companies or entities are blacklisted.

This is not going to do very much. A manager does not need to be "not banned" to do their job as a manager, and they could potentially do their job in its entirety off the forum without even disclosing their account.

I have long advocated for reports regarding damage done via individual company's signature campaigns in the form of number of bans issued, and posts deleted (and associated reasons).  

theymos had previously broached the idea of people subscribing to a signature, but perhaps the "author" of a subscription could (optionally) need to authorize subscriptions so to prevent spammers subscribing to signatures with the intent of making a company/manager look bad

You needn't reserve a post for this.. You seem to do this a couple times: make an OP and make a post reply right after (so essentially a double post). I don't care - but note some people might thing you're doing only it for the signature payout too.

Otherwise, I agree, this Yobit campaign is going to be a flood of "YOBIT" ads. It's normal though - they are paying top rates and to senior+.

As mikeywith cleverly picked up here, some of these spammers seem to write a bunch of posts in advance, save them as drafts, and then just release them all during the next "quota period", which is why they can spam so many posts so quickly. I would add the Stake campaign to the YoBit campaign as being guilty of this behavior.

We need bans. Bans for spammers and bans for managers who enable the spammers. There are some users I've reported 50+ times in the space of a day or two, all their posts are trashed, and then they are back the very next day, posting twice as much to make up for the all their deleted posts. There is a stickied thread in Services saying these users will receive bans for this behavior - this kind of spamming will continue indefinitely until this is enforced.

Challenge accepted: let's see how many I can report in that hour I'm not sure if I'm online though at that time tomorrow.

They choose a different path: they have red trust already (YoBit / Trust: -16: -4 / +0) and have nothing to lose. Yesterday, several topics were created by Newbies including several other Newbies bumping them, so it looks like they hired a spammer instead of a campaign manager.
And with their red trust, managing their campaign won't look good on the campaign manager.

Yobit just need a decent manager who will educate the fools about quality over quantity

I think this a very high goal. It's just like postsing new post every 0.6 seconds minutes.Would you really manage to do so ? ( One liner posts are possible but I think a campaign acceptable post should atleast be 2 liner )

BTW, did you mean 100 a day or hour?

I hope you got permission to do this ahead of time.

It isn’t any secret that it is possible to make large amounts of posts in short periods of time. The merit system has somewhat curtailed this by preventing shitposters (among others) from ranking up. If someone can’t rank up, the ad they display won’t be as attractive to advertisers.

As a side note, someone could potentially create many useful posts in a short period of time (although maybe not 100 posts in an hour), if you have sufficient knowledge of bitcoin related subjects.

Spam haven boards include (but are not limited to):
Bitcoin Discussion
Mining speculation (not as much)
Technical Support (not as much)
Economics
-> Speculation
Marketplace
-> Gambling
->-> Gambling discussion
->-> Investor-based games ("ponzi alert" spam)
-> Lending ("you need collateral" spam)
-> Service Announcements
->-> Micro Earnings
-> Service Discussion
Trading Discussion
Meta (certain threads)
Politics & Society (certain threads)
Beginners & Help
Off-topic
Any altcoin board

I think the only board that is in danger was in the Bitcoin Discussion and Altcoin Discussion board the rest are just fine, that's when the Yobit signature campaign not yet come. as of today spammers are free to post wherever they like as long as they make it looks like a constructive post, cause there is no rules on Yobit Signature campaign that you cannot post on certain board, rather you are free to post on all Sections.
starting today the forum will be filled with the signature campaign abusers so,

Experiment Archives

---

Page 1 (1 - 20)
Page 2 (21 - 40)
Page 3 (41- 59)

---

---

Analysis

---

59 posts in 60 minutes. Not bad!

If the YoBit campaign continues without any qualms regarding member post quality (mine were 'decent', not good) then these would be the rates for 3 members of the ranks:

_{Bitcoin Price: $5300}

Sr. Member:  0.00708 BTC == $37.53 / hr
Hero Member: 0.00944 BTC == $50.03 / hr
Legendary:   0.01180 BTC == $62.54 / hr

Certainly lucrative, especially if your cost of living is low. With more accounts, you can extend your work day.

Let's consider a limit of 3, though.
Using only 7 hours of their time every week:

Sr. Members make:  $262/w | $1050/mo | $13696/yr
Hero Members make: $350/w | $1400/mo | $18261/yr
Legendaries make:  $437/w | $1751/mo | $22827/yr

I've seen account rings span far more than "just" 3 accounts. This is why people farm accounts.

Zero effort. Very little time. Huge profits.

I type fairly quickly. I maneuver around the forum quickly.

If I were a shitposter, how much could I post? Probably a lot. I'm doing an experiment to test this very theory.

Supposing I had multiple accounts and switching between them was as seamless as going to another board (since I won't be using alts) I could garner a large amount of signature earnings from campaigns that didn't care (too much).

---

The reason that shitposting is so lucrative is because of the profit. And to really get a sense of what these account farmers are doing, I wanted to see exactly how profitable it could be. For science!

I hate spamming and therefore I will delete my posts as soon as I can (after archiving the posts for further research) but at 12 AM UTC^*, 4/21/2019, I will start my one hour of "quickposts". (I'll try to "look" constructive like many spammers do by picking random bits of knowledge here and there, but in a way where I can pump out as many posts as possible.)

The goal is >100 within the hour. I think it's possible.

---

This is inspired by the new YoBit campaign which will bring forth a wave of spam. Only Moses can save us now.

---

---

EDIT: This is obviously very empirical and only applies to a shitposter that possesses the same traits as I do.