Ask HN: Why are social media spam bots still a thing?
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? Maybe detecting and blocking them without false positives is actually not trivial. 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. > Why is this still a thing? Because the profit is significantly higher than the cost to create/run one. Like Nigerian email scams, it's still a thing because it still works. Another AI war