@FatBee and whoever interested in botting anything
This post was originally asking a few questions but slowly turned into a adderall enduced conspiracy theory rant on the business relations of SMM Panel resellers and actual botters. The questions I'm most interested about if you'd like to skip the rant are
boldened
My rant isnt a source of truth but I would love to get yours or anyone's thoughts on my conceptual model of how botting works
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I appreciate you opensourcing the projects you posted on freebies, i've spent a lil time glancing over them and comparing it with the projects twitter-api-client and twikit.
1. ) Firstly, are libraries like twitter-api-client or twikit doing what you would call "reverse-engineering"? Your calls +/- some HEADER differences are identical
On the HEADER differences,
1.1 ) You used a more realistic "referrer", i.e others used a catch all "{twitter_url}" while you used "{twitter_url}/settings/profile" when updating profile info. Was this difference figured out by trial and error or just a best guess?
1.2 ) How do you choose a user_agent? I understand the goal is to blend in with the majority? But are some versions or softwares easier / harder to detect?
When you buy likes/followers/etc. from a botter, I imagine they just have a large homogeneous group of bots they'll throw at your account and then keep recycling them for future customers. Inevitably from overuse these accounts get banned and their interactions erased.
2. ) Is there a sustainable way to recycle an account, or, no matter the prevention's taken to look like a real account, its just prolonging the inevitable ban? Whats the longest a botting accounts lasted while actively botting?
If you created an account then (no warmup) followed one MAIN account, (from my limited experience) that follow goes through
If you create a million accounts and (no warmup) they all follow that one MAIN account, I cant imagine that works and the bots get banned or put on a watch list.
(Does it go through?). So its not the individual bots actions that get it banned but rather the event of an account getting a million followers, that raising a red flag getting the MAIN account banned. Then indirectly they link all these new accounts to the MAIN account and punish them.
Now if you gave a million real people $100 to follow your MAIN account, do you think that'd go through? In the case you get banned i doubt the same situation with the new accounts happened where they get banned rather they get a -1 on their social trust score and still be fine.
Now if you create a million accounts (warm them up) by interacting with posts and stuff, they'll increase their social trust score a little. Lets say this warmed up accounts have a social trust score = 10 while a real person account trust score = 100 or something. Same Event happens, they all follow MAIN account, does MAIN account get banned/punished? I assume yes. So now all these warmed up accounts get a -1 to their social trust score.
Lets go back to a botter SMM panel. They have these million accounts, and besides having them perform random actions ( (+) social media trust ), their trust scores probably trending down.
Would it not be better (in terms of avoiding bans) to retire accounts after usage to set their interactions in stone?
This relies on the assumption that a bots interactions get erased when it gets banned, do they:
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The alternative is to constantly throw more bots into the pool to replace the banned ones.
Its kinda like the gambling game CRASH where you have to pick when to cashout with the risk it could crash at any point. The main difference being CRASH follows an exponential curve while a bot accounts value is probably fairly linear or slightly exponential (figuratively) since a older account might have higher trust score whose likes may be worth more to the algorithm (that's an interesting thought, if all likes are equal to the algorithm). If I was a SMM panel owner its in their economic interest to not provide this service (assuming they do solely NO REFILL, per interaction charging) while a reseller, who to be more consumer facing friendly, would offer REFILLs and then have to keep buying new interactions from a botter while they trash the account. I wonder if a botter intentionally tries to get accounts banned after a week or 2 in order to force resellers to rebuy to fulfill their REFILL orders. Ofcourse this cost is probably passed down to the customer but from my time browsing some SMM panel posts its not uncommon to see complaints about REFILLs not being honored / having to go through support