Livejournal News of the Argh: Friending Edition

[nookiepowered]

Hi, folks.

We spam the OOC comm interrupt your rare non-event weekend to bring you an unfortunately not so rare update on unhelpful Livejournal shenanigans

Comments

[necroslacker]

While this is gonna stink for friend adding, I totally get LJ's position here. The spam is insane lately so I'm pleased they're trying to be proactive about it, at least.

[nookiepowered]

I'm not sure it's doing any good, considering the huge spam increase doesn't seem to have died down at all since the change, but it's a rare instance where I can actually follow their thinking.

[glacial_witch]

I don't think I actually got friended by any of the spambots. They all just hit my LJs with comments offering Ugg Boots and confessions of a crush on my wedding journal.

So how is this supposed to be helping, exactly?

[nookiepowered]

My guess is that the spambots are (or were) using the mass-friending ability to get around immediate detection by whatever scripts LJ has set up for identifying suspected fake journals. So it wasn't that they were specifically friending the people they were spamming; it's just that they were friending a bunch of people, period, which made them look less like bots.

[glacial_witch]

Ahhh, that explains it! Thank you!

[nookiepowered]

(I do have another cynical suspicion that's unrelated to spam, though whether it's an alternate explanation or just an additional one, IDK : it's also possible that people were using the mass friending tools to increase their "social capital" and screw with the top post / popularity rankings that mean jack to us but apparently are a huuuuuuge deal to the Cyrillic -- and money-making -- side of things.)

[glacial_witch]

I don't know if we can really call it cynical anymore. I'mma go with justified suspicion, really.