Almost all of our spam isn't generated on patterns, actually; there have been a few networks who have hit us with periodic campaigns of generated stuff, but the majority of it is actual humans writing actual text (sometimes with the help of ChatGPT, but often not; at the exploitation rates a lot of these shops are using, it's cheaper to pay humans than it is to buy ChatGPT time). I bet a lot of your website spam is also done by actual humans: it's easier for a lot of these operations to use people in Pakistan who are being paid pennies because so many sites put in so many systems to detect automated/bot-like activity that it's easier for them to use real people: it's impossible to distinguish their activity from "real people" activity because it is real people activity, it's just real people being paid to spam the shit out of every website they can find with links to the website they're trying to boost the search engine rank of. (And at least the search engine manipulation spammers are usually getting paid. A lot of the people who are running scams, especially online romance/pig-butchering scams, have been trafficked and are working for nothing under threats of grievious bodily harm, and by "a lot" I mean the United Nations report estimates 220,000 people just in Myanmar and Cambodia alone.) (In case you can't tell, I'm awfully fun at parties. And my wife is a forensic DNA analyst; we have to be really careful about what we discuss over dinner when normal people are around.)
But it's an actual booming industry in Pakistan, India, and Vietnam in particular! If you ever look on Fiverr, almost 100% of the listings in the SEO Services category are either from an agency in one of those countries or are someone who contracts out to one of those agencies. I once suspended a backlink spammer's small collection of accounts and he wrote in to us angrily demanding that we unsuspend them because they were his homework and why did we suspend them, his teacher in his spamming, I mean marketing, class told him that Dreamwidth was a great place to spam and if we didn't unsuspend them he was going to get a bad grade in spamming. (Needless to say, I did not unsuspend them. I did, however, tell him to tell his teacher to stop fucking telling students that DW was a good place to spam.) At least part of why so many sites out there have chosen the "walled garden" approach instead of the public approach is because "walled garden" at least cuts off some of one category of spammers (the ones who are doing it for search engine juice), and that's one of the larger categories out there because no matter what you do, you absolutely cannot make the people who are doing it understand that yes, when we mean "no spam", we also mean your SEO fake backlink spam. At least scammers mostly know they're doing something wrong.
(I say "cuts off some of", because a lot of these people are so rotely following instructions they got somewhere else that they don't actually know how to evaluate whether or not their spam is effective. Because of stupid technical reasons, we were completely invisible to Google for about six months sometime ... last year or so? so nothing that got posted gave any Google juice at all. Spam went up! Google literally could not see the accounts! They were just wasting their time! But they don't know how to evaluate whether their techniques and campaigns are effective or not -- a lot of times they even used to make the site's rankings worse, because Google has sort of thrown in the towel now but they used to be really aggressive about detecting and penalizing that kind of behavior -- because they never actually learned anything about search engine optimization; all they learned was how to spam.)
...see? I told you, push button, get lecture, lol.
But yeah, most of our spam is humans, there's just a lot of them. And they have a gigantic number of IP addresses, both wired and mobile, and they have software that destroys the VM they just used and spins up a new one (to defeat browser fingerprinting) and grabs a fresh IP address after every spam account they make, and there are entire office complexes in Karachi and Lahore that have network drops from 20 different ISPs and employ thousands of people, sitting there spamming away, day in and day out. And I don't blame the individual people who are doing the actual work, they're just trying to do something easy to feed their families, but the people who run those operations? Yeah, I just want fifteen minutes alone with them to have a chat while the security cameras are off. What, this? That's my emotional support crowbar. It emotionally supports me.
(And then I'm going to visit Fiverr, because they know goddamn well all of those listings are for spamming services, and my emotional support crowbar and I would like a word.)
no subject
But it's an actual booming industry in Pakistan, India, and Vietnam in particular! If you ever look on Fiverr, almost 100% of the listings in the SEO Services category are either from an agency in one of those countries or are someone who contracts out to one of those agencies. I once suspended a backlink spammer's small collection of accounts and he wrote in to us angrily demanding that we unsuspend them because they were his homework and why did we suspend them, his teacher in his spamming, I mean marketing, class told him that Dreamwidth was a great place to spam and if we didn't unsuspend them he was going to get a bad grade in spamming. (Needless to say, I did not unsuspend them. I did, however, tell him to tell his teacher to stop fucking telling students that DW was a good place to spam.) At least part of why so many sites out there have chosen the "walled garden" approach instead of the public approach is because "walled garden" at least cuts off some of one category of spammers (the ones who are doing it for search engine juice), and that's one of the larger categories out there because no matter what you do, you absolutely cannot make the people who are doing it understand that yes, when we mean "no spam", we also mean your SEO fake backlink spam. At least scammers mostly know they're doing something wrong.
(I say "cuts off some of", because a lot of these people are so rotely following instructions they got somewhere else that they don't actually know how to evaluate whether or not their spam is effective. Because of stupid technical reasons, we were completely invisible to Google for about six months sometime ... last year or so? so nothing that got posted gave any Google juice at all. Spam went up! Google literally could not see the accounts! They were just wasting their time! But they don't know how to evaluate whether their techniques and campaigns are effective or not -- a lot of times they even used to make the site's rankings worse, because Google has sort of thrown in the towel now but they used to be really aggressive about detecting and penalizing that kind of behavior -- because they never actually learned anything about search engine optimization; all they learned was how to spam.)
...see? I told you, push button, get lecture, lol.
But yeah, most of our spam is humans, there's just a lot of them. And they have a gigantic number of IP addresses, both wired and mobile, and they have software that destroys the VM they just used and spins up a new one (to defeat browser fingerprinting) and grabs a fresh IP address after every spam account they make, and there are entire office complexes in Karachi and Lahore that have network drops from 20 different ISPs and employ thousands of people, sitting there spamming away, day in and day out. And I don't blame the individual people who are doing the actual work, they're just trying to do something easy to feed their families, but the people who run those operations? Yeah, I just want fifteen minutes alone with them to have a chat while the security cameras are off. What, this? That's my emotional support crowbar. It emotionally supports me.
(And then I'm going to visit Fiverr, because they know goddamn well all of those listings are for spamming services, and my emotional support crowbar and I would like a word.)