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Ask HN: Why are social media spam bots still a thing?

6 points by Avalaxy ↗ HN
Specifically Instagram. After many years, I still get regular messages from spam bots, usually pretending to be women that are romantically interested. It seems trivial to ban (or even prevent) those accounts, from a technical perspective. Reporting them also doesn't seem to do much. Why is this still a thing? This should have been a solved problem years ago no? Are there, besides technical reasons, other reasons to keep spam bots alive on their platforms?

5 comments

[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 24.9 ms ] thread
akerl_
Maybe detecting and blocking them without false positives is actually not trivial.
krapp
Like Nigerian email scams, it's still a thing because it still works.
pwg
> Why is this still a thing?

Because the profit is significantly higher than the cost to create/run one.

nextn
The technical reason is sending a message is free.

The non-technical reason is companies prefer to keep the majority of the advertising money instead of pay users with it. Users don't complain and don't try alternative services.