Last night I had some free time to relax and take a break from the daily grind. Well, I didn’t really *have* time, but I made time. While most people kick back and watch the tube for relaxation, I surf the web with no real goals. So I decided to spend a little time on Netscape.
I’ve had an account with Netscape for six months now, but I’ve never really gotten around to surfing the pages or submitting news. Last night I decided to give it a go. I pulled up the RSS feeds and knocked out a few stories that had come up within the ten minutes of me checking. It gave me a chance to get a feel for the site and understand the differences between Netscape and Digg.
There were quite a few differences, but I’ll talk about those in another post. What really caught my attention last night is the apparent use of bots by Netscape in a terrible attempt to spur discussion. I watched about three or four “members” follow me around and vote/comment on my submissions, without having a clue what they were about. I took note of these members, but to keep this post to a minimum I’ll use just one for the sake of my argument.
The user in question goes by the name of “Tristanmax“. At first, I was happy to see Tristanmax vote and comment on my submission. The vote and comment came almost IMMEDIATELY after I posted.
The first comment was quite believable. In fact, I even responded to it and went to add tristanmax as a friend. But then more and more votes and comments started coming through. Many of them were just flat out absurd.
Here are some examples:
On a post titled -”The Host” Wins Big at HK’s First Asian Film Awards-, Tristan says “Thanks!”
A submission titled “Interview of Korean Pop Idol Rain“, the user gets rewarded with Tristans brilliant response, “Vote for Obama! He’s the best!”
Submission titled “Beyonce Knowles Feat. Shakira – Beautiful Liar Music Video“, we get the wonderful response, “Please save America! Stop Bush!”
And one titled “Debt Settlement vs. Bankruptcy” drudges up the response “How are you doing mate?”
This is only the beginning. These completely irrelevant responses are a dime a dozen throughout Netscape. And what is worse, is these users DO NOT respond or ever come back to the page once they vote and comment.
My guess is that either:
A) These users are there for the purpose of spam and are being paid to build profiles, or
B) Being paid by Netscape to try and make the site appear far more active than it really is, or
C) They are bots created by Netscape to create a false community with the hope that a natural group will eventually replace it.
Either way, it’s a perfectly good explanation as to why Netscape is failing on all fronts. That being said, I would love to know if these are bots. If they are, it’s down right insulting and I for one will never use the site again.
Anyone know?
About eric:
Eric Odom is project manager for Blogivists.com. A web strategist by trade, Odom is currently working to develop infrastructure for activists within the liberty movement.
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36 Responses to “Is NetScape using bots to try and stir discussion?”
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I think if we were programming userbots, we’d give them something more intelligent to say. Yours are ridiculous assumptions.
Christopher Finke
Netscape
Notice the post was a QUESTION, not an assertion.
Your title is a question, but you answer it with ridiculous examples of how Netscape could be gaming itself. Netscape-designed bots trolling the discussion threads with political flamebait? Come on!
Lemme’ help.
“My guess is that either:
A) These users are there for the purpose of spam and are being paid to build profiles, or
B) Being paid by Netscape to try and make the site appear far more active than it really is, or
C) They are bots created by Netscape to create a false community with the hope that a natural group will eventually replace it.”
“Anyone know?”
That is the part you seem to be overlooking.
I’m not sure why you think I’m overlooking that section; those are the “ridiculous examples” I referenced in comment #3.
There is no doubt bots exist, but I can assure you they aren’t ours.
We actually do have staff patrolling the waters and finding the more obvious bots, some get passed. Though pointing this out helps us design our tools better, thanks!
Great! The perhaps you’ll enlighten us as to why a member such as this is allowed to run around and spam Netscape?
Well it could be true, I don’t put it past Digg, Netscape or any other company. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a company do this, but then that means Netscape is ripe for exploitation – although it lacks the audience that would rationalize spending such efforts to do so.
I don’t think the bots are from netscape. Bots exist on almost every popular network. Sometimes the reason for their existence is a mystery. Perhaps someone was just testing out a commenting bot.
It is hard for me to see how netscape would benefit from this. They would have to know that instead of generating discussion, the bots would become immediately obvious. I think it would be obvious to them that the bots would be counteractive to creating a quality discussion.
Wow Christopher…getting a little defensive there.
…TOO defensive…
I enjoyed the article until the following sentence: “Either way, it’s a perfectly good explanation as to why Netscape is failing on all fronts.”
By what means are you measuring failure here? Without some type of explanation as to why you think Netscape is “failing on all fronts” you sound like a troll.
How about they aren’t allowed. Just like those emails in my inbox for penis pills aren’t.
Tristanmax seems to no longer exist as a user on Netscape
[...] Is NetScape using bots to try and stir discussion? Filed under: Uncategorized — recar @ 8:50 pm Is NetScape using bots to try and stir discussion? After watching the habits of certain users on Netscape, it might be fair to say the social bookmarking site is using bots in an attempt to create the idea that the community is bustling, when in reality, it’s all a scam.[news] [industry news] [technology] [site] [...]
Vote for Obama! He’s the best!
What, too soon?
These Netscape employees are a bit paranoid if you ask me. Fishy business.
Please save America! Stop Bush!
Well I am confused. Netscape says that these bots are not their doing, so that leaves me wondering whose work they are.
If the bots were actually posting links (which I cannot verify one way or the other since all the comments mentioned have been removed) then it’d make sense that Netscape has nothing to do with it. But it at least appears that they’re not; they’re posting pointless, irrelevant, generic comments. What would the spammers themselves have to gain from this? The only thing I can think of is that they’re testing the effectiveness of their bots for future spamming.
If it is an effort from Netscape it’s pretty pitiful, so pitiful I’d imagine they’d be too good for it. Then again they did turn their website into a shameless digg knockoff (although it seems sites of the sort have become somewhat of a paradigm and thus have become more of a cliche than a ripoff), so I can’t completely put it past them.
They have indeed shot down the account and removed all of Tristan’s information.
If my memory serves me, the member had not submitted any news. The member was only voting and commenting.
The user also had more than 250 friends.
Let me begin by disclosing that I’m a blogger/assistant lead for two blogs under Weblogs, Inc., the company founded by Netscape founder Jason Calacanis. I have nothing to do with Netscape, and an easy glace at my profiles at both digg and Netscape (user: dcharti) will reveal I spend a helluva lot more time on digg.
That said: isn’t it entirely possible these could be bots run by someone who hates Netscape, or someone who is simply trying to capitalize on its traffic by spamming with one URL or another? There’s a fairly significant portion of digg users who hate Netscape simply by default, and Netscape also caters quite a bit to the political and religious topics as well. We all know how nicely radicals from all these groups like to play.
Christopher Finke, you are a clear example of poor customer relations between internet users and companies such as Netscape. Getting upset and posting sarcastic and trivial responses such as the ones you have simply makes it even more obvious about your lack of responsibility toward the user and consumer. Instead of responding in such a menial way, how about listing or showing us examples of non-”bottish” replies, or showing how administrators try to prevent bots from posting. Instead, you leave that to an obviously more experienced and more user-friendly employee under the name of Trey.
Your lack of professionalism can be traced everywhere you leave comments and I am astounded that you are not reprimanded for it by a superior.
I for one know that I would not want a developer or programmer working for my company who had such a disdainful attitude toward potential users.
Thanks for nothing… found this on digg and fell for the sensational headline. But it’s such a pedestrian observation that doesn’t have any musle or merit.
“Notice the post was a QUESTION…” yeah but you still chose the wording to mislead… should have been “I farted around on Netscape and found some bogus comments!” but that wouldn’t get diggs would it. Thanks dude for wasting my Digg break at work today!
My guess is that if you look at each of the offending profiles you’ll see a link to some splog or other source of evil spam. My guess is that in creating a network of friends and commenting and voting, they are attempting to fool Google into indexing their sites since their profile links to them.
David, if it’s such a waste of time, perhaps you shouldn’t bother commenting. That took even MORE of your time, no?
I run a forum myself, and we get flooded with those types of bots ourselves.
They’re spambots, programmed to automatically
1. Create an account
2. Post random nonsense
The reason for it? Check their signatures, or “home page” link… it usually links to a site selling v|agra or r0|ex…
All this proves is that Netscape doesn’t do much policing of their forums for these spambots…
You know what’s funny? My sarcastic replies have been deleted. Buried as lame.
You bet they have. I’m not going to allow comments that use tristan@netscape.com as an e-mail address and netscape.com as a site.
Normally, I would moderate that crap out because you are clearly using a FAKE e-mail address.
And you aren’t the first person to quote one of Tristan’s spam comments trying to be sarcastic.
Seriously…
Yeah, i’m just a 17 year old kid.
now i feel like an asshole…You can just delete these comments
I think you need to get your priorities straight.
At the minimum Netscape is deficient in properly filtering the bots. Otherwise Netscape is at least complicit with whoever is using the bots.
Whoa, terrible customer service by Netscape given the attitude of responses posted here. I agree with comment 21. Seriously Netscape, get your act together.
Chris Finke is right… Eric’s assumptions *are* ridiculous. Why would it even occur to him that Netscape would be setting spambots loose on their own network?
400+ diggs and counting. I guess having a title like “Is NetScape using bots to try and stir discussion?” works.
I work for Netscape and I will answer your question, we aren’t using bots. Netscape is a pretty big social website, we get thousands upon thousands of comments each day. Sure anybody could lurk Netscape for an hour and you are sure to collect a handful of bizarre, random comments.
The activity you stumbled upon and blogger about is called in the moderating world “anti-social behavior”, this type of activity is generally frowned about. However when running a large community you can’t investigate each case, because in the end these comments are harmless.
Otherwise it looks like the user you pointed out has been banned. Your blog post turned out to be very useful for us in that regard, however the automatic assumption that Netscape was tricking people and hiring bots does come off as a baiting blog post. Chris took your bait.
Netscape does hire people to help the community we moderate discussions and link submissions to ensure there is no spam making it’s way through our pipes. That much is true and Netscape has been very open about the “Navigator” program.
[...] I have to hand it to some people, they have great imaginations. Eric Odom takes the cake on theories this week, throwing the idea out that Netscape is actually using bots in order to grow the community. [...]
I think we all know that Netscape is a professional website trying to become a major player in the social news business. Netscape itself is a big name. Regardless of what your preferences are between social news websites (digg, netscape, reddit, others…) in my opinion it doesn’t make a bit of sense that Netscape would unleash a bunch of very obvious bots to post obviously automated comments to ‘promote website discussion’. I hardly think that Netscape is that starved for traffic that they would resort to using unethical tactics such as comment bots to boost discussion. Given the fact that the comments shown in this blog post really stand out as being completely irrelevant to the discussion of the stories, I would think this would be the work of an amateur. Does anyone really think that Netscape would seriously jeopardize their position in the social media scene by scripting some user accounts to post automated replies to submissions? Spare me.
Dude, that isn’t even the tip of the iceberg. I sat in the political chat forum on an extremely prominent social site for many hours a day cause I knew something was up, finally caught it slipping. The site is partially owned by AOL and when I caught the game slipping it was pawned off to me as a “social experiment” when in reality the shit has more to do with data mining and getting to know a little more about you, if you know what I mean. You know, that good ole TIA stuff. You know all those ads floating around that ask you for your email, zip code, birthdate and gender? I read some studies where 87% or so of people are identifiable by the zip/DOB/gender combo. Add to that an email address and, well, you get the picture. When people say “Don’t feed the trolls” they mean it.