Bot Swarm Patina
I noticed some talk elsewhere happened yesterday about this writeup on purchasing views:
A 2022 study co-authored by Dek showed that around ten Euros on average (just over ten US dollars) can buy some 90,000 fake views or 200 fake comments for a typical social media post.
It brought a few people to discuss the matter.
I also notice a bespoke bearblog-focused account, grizzly gazette, as well as herman, who runs the platform, talking about upvotes on bearblog’s discover.
The “Chemical Hygiene” post with its fraction of the upvotes leads me to believe it acquired them organically on Bear Blog. Whatever the source of the upvotes, these two bloggers’ rhetoric—as my chosen examples—is increasingly encroaching all over Trending.
(above is just to note a distinct lack of bot swarm mention.)
This is to say, both seem to be true at once (within the context of garnering - or brokering - attention): frictionless gameability and held traction exist. I find it wild.
And interesting. Even as lending swarm-fudged metrics unbeknownst creedance strikes some in the same same nerve as losing their vision, or, at least realizing a piece of content one re-shares is generated art.
The discussion reminded me of this investigative journaling piece from years ago:
Twitter retweets x 1000 $10
LinkedIn company page followers x 1000 $5
Instagram followers x 1000 $2
Pinterest followers x 1000 $2
Twitch followers x 1000 $2
Instagram likes x 1000 $2
Inviting More
May I have more investigation into the ecosystem of purchasing likes and how these seemingly impossible credulous/incredible worlds compose events in mine?
This topic is free to devolve into “people have herd mentality 
live with it” - though I would like, for a moment, to hear more on the “ranch dog of bot swarm” talk and less on the “human bovine is social herd matrix” talk.
It’s a fine line! This was fun and helpful for me to try and trace around it. I’m glad I have a space to word my thoughts.
Appendix
A spec fic blending human swarm and bot swarm I haven’t finished reading, may that help:
Most of the actual jobs are simple. In one, I was told to go to a certain add and take a photograph of a building at a particular time. In another, I was supposed to go to a vendor in an open air market, find a tourist of middle eastern descent wearing a green military jacket, and tell him the numbers 53, 168.7, 55, 13, 804. I was unable to find him.
edit: more appendix entries
A writer touchs on the implications (if not the topic) in a part of this (larger) post (on algorithms, in general):
https://theiqrafiles.com/notes-on-cognitive-hacking-and-algorithmic-corruption/
These algorithms … are operationalising [soft power through infrastructure. The distinction between content and context collapses, and with it, the distinction between persuasion and coercion], encoding them into the infrastructure of the real in ways that cannot be traced back to intention or ideology in the conventional sense.
Oh, and Doctorow’s Reverse-Centaur talk:
… it will “hallucinate” a library called lib.pdf.text.parsing. And the thing is, malicious hackers know that the AI will make this error, so they will go out and create a library with the predictable, hallucinated name, and that library will get automatically sucked into your program, and it will do things like steal user data or try and penetrate other computers on the same network.
And you, the human in the loop – the reverse centaur – you have to spot this subtle, hard to find error, this bug that is literally statistically indistinguishable from correct code. Now, maybe a senior coder could catch this, because they’ve been around the block a few times, and they know about this tripwire.