Comment by Bender

1 day ago

They bragged about it for a while but after the bragging stopped my proof is only anecdotal. When the United States Agency for International Development was defunded the bots went quiet and shortly thereafter the site was hacked using a vulnerability that had been well known since 2012. It was peaceful for a few weeks prior to the hack and for a couple weeks after the hack. Most of the fake racists disappeared from /pol/ and /g/ stopped shilling products. It was just real people and the site was just as active as the hundreds of other chans. Best I can tell 4chan is a test site to fine tune social manipulation GPT's. All the bots, fake racists and shillers are back now suggesting to me the manipulators started getting funded by other means. Before someone says it, there are a few real racists there too. The bots attract and egg them on. Most moved to 8chan. I think that is part of the experiment and tuning. Perhaps some day the veil will be lifted.

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Bender

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bananalychee  1 day ago

If that's true you should be able to see that in the public traffic statistics.

  • Bender  1 day ago

    I thought about that as well. This would be true if team-hiromoot is not cooperating with the bot owners, otherwise the bots could simply be excluded given all their traffic is authenticated with a 4chan pass. Other chans have manipulated their stats to change how active they appear so it's really hard for me to rely upon that.

    • fiso64  1 day ago

      At this point your hypothesis is unfalsifiable. I was on /g/ before and after the hack and didn't detect any big changes. It was as shitty as ever.

      2 replies →

    • Anon1096  1 day ago

      There are non affiliated stat trackers like 4stats.io or any of the archive sites. It's pure nonsense/conspiracy theory to suggest everything is bot content now.