A lot of people here have been writing that bots are adding them as friends, but I hadn’t really noticed it myself. But yesterday I looked at the LiveJournal ranking and was surprised: sergeydolya and I had always been running roughly neck and neck (within about ±500 friends), and then all of a sudden he had fallen far "behind" me:
I hadn’t written anything special that could explain a sudden spike in popularity. So I went to look at the dynamics of new friend adds. And that’s where the catch was:
Starting on October 17, there was a fairly unusual surge in friending activity. Let me remind you that Murtazin wrote about the launch of "United Russia political technology" on the 17th. And from October 22 onward, the bots started coming in batches. About 8,000 of them have already friended me (and they say it’s hard to become a "thousander" on LiveJournal). On top of that, there’s an absolutely obvious increase in the activity of "live bots." A group of 3–4 pro-United Russia nerds writes these supposedly "intellectual comments" in a "subtle trolling" format: - we used to support you, but now you’re just not what you used to be. Disappointed. - I believed in you, but you’re a scumbag. I’m voting for Putin. - I’m your supporter, but why are you keeping quiet about the vodka trade issue? The new journals are registered manually, but they’re very easy to spot. In 85% of cases they have no posts at all; sometimes there are 5 or 6 repost entries. The journal names are things like hsmvjb345 or aleksandrov_nikolay. You ban one, and about 15 minutes later mnjnvd346 crawls out with the same comment. How exactly the bots will be used is still unclear. Most likely their purpose is simply to push shady posts into the top rankings. Or to create hell in the comments, like happened to me back in the spring. What should be done about it? Nothing. The main thing is to remember the basic commandment of the internet: don’t feed the troll. It actually annoys me to see people seriously arguing with these "live bots" in the comments, creating huge threads. It’s pointless: he gets paid to write this stuff, and you’re not going to change his mind. Just ignore them. Whenever I have a free minute, I drop in and ban them. Sometimes I have to delete an entire comment thread, so don’t be offended if you spent an hour arguing and then it all gets deleted. Before you start arguing, take a look at the journal and see whether it’s a real user or just a tool for earning a tiny bit of money for some member of the "Young Guard of United Russia" (the youth wing of the ruling party). After all, he gets paid based on the number of comments. Ignore them, don’t feed the trolls, and they’ll die off on their own.