VisualA
Junior Member
- Aug 22, 2024
- 171
- 217
Hi! I am some random guy you saw on the internet.
What are my qualifications? Hardly anything. Even if you are the least experienced botter you know, I am here to say that you have probably been doing this longer than I have. Despite this, I'm going to soapbox about botting for a little while. You could scroll down my (insanely long) essay on this topic (which I admittedly know little about) and just say to yourself "Wow, this is too long. I don't think I need to read this" Then feel free to go back to buying pre-made reddit accounts at a premium and throwing them at reddit network security all day.
Or... you could hear what I have to say. Either way, I will understand. Its fine. I won't be mad.
Part 1: The prelude.
I have been on the internet since 1992 and I have seen a lot of things go down over the years. I won't bore you with a history lesson but (puts on old man glasses) "Back in my day we didn't have all this fancy stuff! Now get off my lawn!"
Browsers change, practices change, software changes and technology changes. But one thing that never seems to change is a man's acceptance of fallacy. Even now, we are still behaving the same way we did thirty years ago. Corporate network security employees believe that there is some magic-bullet technology that will one day merge all the sci-fi themes into a single software package and instantly solve everyone's problems. Meanwhile, blackhatters slowly come to the conclusion that they need to run their operations as a respectable business enterprise and all their collective misfortunes are nothing more than the combined cost of doing business.
Neither of these are true.
To understand the cat and mouse game that is website manipulation, we must first understand microbiology. (If you haven't already stopped reading, now is your chance because this is going to be a long one.)
Part 2: The human immune system.
Not only do I find startling parallels between network security and the human immune system, but I have come to the conclusion that these two topics are intimately related. This comes as the direct result of humans perceiving the world in very much the same way as a single celled organism does.
In microbiology terms (I am summarizing) this system can be broken down into two groups. Innate and Adaptive. Innate would be static barriers. Things like your skin, your stomach, your nose. These present natural barriers and make life difficult for foreign invaders.
The adaptive immune system is a lot more dynamic. White blood cells patrol your body and wait for 'problems' to be reported. When a human cell comes under attack or experiences a critical failure of some kind, it can call for help. After the call goes out, a B cell (or T cell) shows up on the scene. These cells have direct control over other, more experienced law enforcement cells and can summon a hurricane of destruction if they need to. Once the crime scene is secured, they do their best to try to figure out what is responsible and what they can do about it in the future.
What this results in- is profile building. It identifies certain types of 'bad actor' intruders and spreads this information all over the body. Sort of like an 'all points bulletin'. If this bad actor ever returns, it is immediately identified and met with the combined force of your entire immune system.
Part 3: Parallels.
Whether it is Google, Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, Ebay. These platforms attract to a similar type of 'immune system'. First there is the innate and these are details such as requiring a user to make an account, requiring a verified email, requiring a verified phone number, captcha, browser evaluation, etc. These are not necessarily designed to stop you, however they know it will complicate your efforts and that is precisely why they do it. Elon Musk, quite famously, suggested the introduction of a $1 fee to all users with the idea being that no one would want to spend $1000/month running a bot network of 1000 users.
They can do it, sure, it is definitely possible. It simply makes life difficult and that is the point.
The reddit admins must operate in a way which is different than the adaptive immune system, correct? No, of course not, it is completely the same. A user hits the report button and elevates it to an admin. The admin takes a long hard look at you. He figures out what you are doing and how you are doing it. He looks at things like where you are posting from, what hours you are active, what kind of browsers you use, what your habits are, what your strategy is, how often you click on things. After he has properly categorized you along the lines of 'What you are up to', he will assign you a label and make note of any relevant identifiers. After you have been tagged with 'an antibody' all he has to do is sit back and wait until your unique identifier pops up on his radar. Then his brand of automation bans you. It is really that easy.
Consider this, if you were a network engineer working for reddit, could you identify and thwart yourself? I know I sure could. It would be easy. I would just look for a series of mobile connections coming from Farmington, Iowa. Accounts that were all made using emails from gmx.com. They would start logging in sometime around 6pm EST and would spend no more than 15 minutes per account just surfing on random threads. They would upvote exactly one comment and then log off for the night. There would be 100 of them and they would run back to back from Tuesday until Wednesday afternoon, ending at 7pm and not returning for at least two days.
The question is... why would I care? Why on earth would I want to go out and be looking for myself? Why would Reddit admins? No one has complained about me. There have been no issues, no disturbances. Searching for patterns in a long list of worthless data is really just a huge waste of time when the person in question hasn't been reported for anything. There is a misconception here on this forum that simply logging in to reddit in an improper way will get you banned. If this were true, Reddit would be banning tens of thousands of innocent posters every single day. Who would find this acceptable? You will often hear the claim "You have to warm up your account by posting once every other day before you can do anything else" or "You need X amount of karma by a certain date or else the axe comes down on you." If any of this were true, people all across Reddit would be talking about it non stop. Do you know how many newbies would be banned for simply making the mistake of trying to submit a second post just a few hours after the first?
Much like the human immune system, it is quite possible for the body to attack everything it sees. If it isn't shy about slaughtering healthy human cells at the same rate that it is killing foreign invaders, it could have an easy time of accomplishing the goal. Hell, just fill your veins with bleach and you will never catch the flu again.
But this is what separates the adaptive immune system from the innate immune system. The adaptive immune system is designed to target specific strains of 'Troublemakers'. Thats right! It might interest you to know that your body has more bacteria running around inside than 'human cells'. You are primarily composed of foreign invaders. The reason your immune system does not immediately destroy these bacteria cells is because it understands that none of them are causing problems. Does this coliform belong here in the liver? Just wandering around and touching things? Probably not. But no one has complained so nothing will be done about it.
This is the secret to using any platform on the internet. It is not about obeying TOS. Shit, I don't even know what the TOS is, I've never read it. But I know that if some one complains about my activities then the immune system will get involved and if there isn't a rule against what I am doing, they will make one.
When they go to ban me, they won't decide to ban everyone using microsoft edge, or everyone who failed a captcha, or everyone from iowa. They will flag me for observation and then will study the things that make me unique to them. And when they finally go to ban me, their bots will hit my accounts with 100% accuracy and precision every single time.
Knowing this, it might be tempting to simply buy accounts and try to throw them at the system faster than they can be banned but ultimately, You are going to have to face the fact that reddit security will simply find a way to identify and ban you faster. I realize that it can be tough trying to develop a business model which will not attract negative attention HOWEVER, try not to think of it that way. Instead consider a business model that will make detection an impossibility.
The body has something like this, it is called a virus.
It enters the body, doesn't bother anyone, pretends to be a hapless piece of RNA and stumbles into the heart of the body's operation. By the time your immune system realizes there is a problem... it has already accomplished its objective. This is because it was unidentified long enough to get what it wanted.
TLDR FAQ Section:
1) How do these guys ban me so fast?
Because they know you. They know who you are, they know where you are and they know what you intend. They have seen you before and they know exactly how to pick you out of a crowd and get rid of you.
2) I just bought a reddit account and it was immediately banned. Why?
Because you used it. No other reason.
If anyone else had used it, it probably would not have been banned.
3) What is the best set up to use?
There is no best. Read up on all of your options, understand the technology that goes into it. Know what it does. If this is automation related, study your craft. If it is a proxy service, find out how often those IPs rotate, where they come from, who uses them after you. Will reddit think you are a normal user when they see your IP or will they think you are *****? Those are two completely different reactions.
4) Can I use a copy of your bot?
Of course not, why would I want Reddit to think that you are me?
5) How do I make a 100% stealth bot?
Use the best cloaking technology anyone has ever created. Its called the "I don't care about that guy" cloak. So long as you make admins/mods/security not care about you... it is like you are invisible.
6) How do they detect me at all?
You are acting like yourself. As a result, reddit thinks you are you. (And they are correct 99.9% of the time)
7) Reddit knows all about me. What do I do? How do I escape their witch-hunt?
Go back to basics. Get a new device, make a new email, use a new IP, make a new reddit account. Do things on reddit you wouldn't normally do. There is no way they could know who you are at that point, not unless the person who sold you the phone is secretly working for them.
Take a deep breath and walk through the process one step at a time. When Reddit eventually figures out who you are and bans you... you will know exactly what they are looking for. The exact detail that lets them separate you from every other person who has ever logged in.
Then change it. It will be as if you suddenly disappeared from their vision.
8) How do I avoid attracting negative attention?
Just imagine yourself in their position. When those admin mails hit, they have to take action. They have to fight you SPECIFICALLY. Stay off their radar. Be a virus. Find a way to hide in plain sight.
Best of luck yo!
What are my qualifications? Hardly anything. Even if you are the least experienced botter you know, I am here to say that you have probably been doing this longer than I have. Despite this, I'm going to soapbox about botting for a little while. You could scroll down my (insanely long) essay on this topic (which I admittedly know little about) and just say to yourself "Wow, this is too long. I don't think I need to read this" Then feel free to go back to buying pre-made reddit accounts at a premium and throwing them at reddit network security all day.
Or... you could hear what I have to say. Either way, I will understand. Its fine. I won't be mad.
Part 1: The prelude.
I have been on the internet since 1992 and I have seen a lot of things go down over the years. I won't bore you with a history lesson but (puts on old man glasses) "Back in my day we didn't have all this fancy stuff! Now get off my lawn!"
Browsers change, practices change, software changes and technology changes. But one thing that never seems to change is a man's acceptance of fallacy. Even now, we are still behaving the same way we did thirty years ago. Corporate network security employees believe that there is some magic-bullet technology that will one day merge all the sci-fi themes into a single software package and instantly solve everyone's problems. Meanwhile, blackhatters slowly come to the conclusion that they need to run their operations as a respectable business enterprise and all their collective misfortunes are nothing more than the combined cost of doing business.
Neither of these are true.
To understand the cat and mouse game that is website manipulation, we must first understand microbiology. (If you haven't already stopped reading, now is your chance because this is going to be a long one.)
Part 2: The human immune system.
Not only do I find startling parallels between network security and the human immune system, but I have come to the conclusion that these two topics are intimately related. This comes as the direct result of humans perceiving the world in very much the same way as a single celled organism does.
In microbiology terms (I am summarizing) this system can be broken down into two groups. Innate and Adaptive. Innate would be static barriers. Things like your skin, your stomach, your nose. These present natural barriers and make life difficult for foreign invaders.
The adaptive immune system is a lot more dynamic. White blood cells patrol your body and wait for 'problems' to be reported. When a human cell comes under attack or experiences a critical failure of some kind, it can call for help. After the call goes out, a B cell (or T cell) shows up on the scene. These cells have direct control over other, more experienced law enforcement cells and can summon a hurricane of destruction if they need to. Once the crime scene is secured, they do their best to try to figure out what is responsible and what they can do about it in the future.
What this results in- is profile building. It identifies certain types of 'bad actor' intruders and spreads this information all over the body. Sort of like an 'all points bulletin'. If this bad actor ever returns, it is immediately identified and met with the combined force of your entire immune system.
Part 3: Parallels.
Whether it is Google, Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, Ebay. These platforms attract to a similar type of 'immune system'. First there is the innate and these are details such as requiring a user to make an account, requiring a verified email, requiring a verified phone number, captcha, browser evaluation, etc. These are not necessarily designed to stop you, however they know it will complicate your efforts and that is precisely why they do it. Elon Musk, quite famously, suggested the introduction of a $1 fee to all users with the idea being that no one would want to spend $1000/month running a bot network of 1000 users.
They can do it, sure, it is definitely possible. It simply makes life difficult and that is the point.
The reddit admins must operate in a way which is different than the adaptive immune system, correct? No, of course not, it is completely the same. A user hits the report button and elevates it to an admin. The admin takes a long hard look at you. He figures out what you are doing and how you are doing it. He looks at things like where you are posting from, what hours you are active, what kind of browsers you use, what your habits are, what your strategy is, how often you click on things. After he has properly categorized you along the lines of 'What you are up to', he will assign you a label and make note of any relevant identifiers. After you have been tagged with 'an antibody' all he has to do is sit back and wait until your unique identifier pops up on his radar. Then his brand of automation bans you. It is really that easy.
Consider this, if you were a network engineer working for reddit, could you identify and thwart yourself? I know I sure could. It would be easy. I would just look for a series of mobile connections coming from Farmington, Iowa. Accounts that were all made using emails from gmx.com. They would start logging in sometime around 6pm EST and would spend no more than 15 minutes per account just surfing on random threads. They would upvote exactly one comment and then log off for the night. There would be 100 of them and they would run back to back from Tuesday until Wednesday afternoon, ending at 7pm and not returning for at least two days.
The question is... why would I care? Why on earth would I want to go out and be looking for myself? Why would Reddit admins? No one has complained about me. There have been no issues, no disturbances. Searching for patterns in a long list of worthless data is really just a huge waste of time when the person in question hasn't been reported for anything. There is a misconception here on this forum that simply logging in to reddit in an improper way will get you banned. If this were true, Reddit would be banning tens of thousands of innocent posters every single day. Who would find this acceptable? You will often hear the claim "You have to warm up your account by posting once every other day before you can do anything else" or "You need X amount of karma by a certain date or else the axe comes down on you." If any of this were true, people all across Reddit would be talking about it non stop. Do you know how many newbies would be banned for simply making the mistake of trying to submit a second post just a few hours after the first?
Much like the human immune system, it is quite possible for the body to attack everything it sees. If it isn't shy about slaughtering healthy human cells at the same rate that it is killing foreign invaders, it could have an easy time of accomplishing the goal. Hell, just fill your veins with bleach and you will never catch the flu again.
But this is what separates the adaptive immune system from the innate immune system. The adaptive immune system is designed to target specific strains of 'Troublemakers'. Thats right! It might interest you to know that your body has more bacteria running around inside than 'human cells'. You are primarily composed of foreign invaders. The reason your immune system does not immediately destroy these bacteria cells is because it understands that none of them are causing problems. Does this coliform belong here in the liver? Just wandering around and touching things? Probably not. But no one has complained so nothing will be done about it.
This is the secret to using any platform on the internet. It is not about obeying TOS. Shit, I don't even know what the TOS is, I've never read it. But I know that if some one complains about my activities then the immune system will get involved and if there isn't a rule against what I am doing, they will make one.
When they go to ban me, they won't decide to ban everyone using microsoft edge, or everyone who failed a captcha, or everyone from iowa. They will flag me for observation and then will study the things that make me unique to them. And when they finally go to ban me, their bots will hit my accounts with 100% accuracy and precision every single time.
Knowing this, it might be tempting to simply buy accounts and try to throw them at the system faster than they can be banned but ultimately, You are going to have to face the fact that reddit security will simply find a way to identify and ban you faster. I realize that it can be tough trying to develop a business model which will not attract negative attention HOWEVER, try not to think of it that way. Instead consider a business model that will make detection an impossibility.
The body has something like this, it is called a virus.
It enters the body, doesn't bother anyone, pretends to be a hapless piece of RNA and stumbles into the heart of the body's operation. By the time your immune system realizes there is a problem... it has already accomplished its objective. This is because it was unidentified long enough to get what it wanted.
TLDR FAQ Section:
1) How do these guys ban me so fast?
Because they know you. They know who you are, they know where you are and they know what you intend. They have seen you before and they know exactly how to pick you out of a crowd and get rid of you.
2) I just bought a reddit account and it was immediately banned. Why?
Because you used it. No other reason.
If anyone else had used it, it probably would not have been banned.
3) What is the best set up to use?
There is no best. Read up on all of your options, understand the technology that goes into it. Know what it does. If this is automation related, study your craft. If it is a proxy service, find out how often those IPs rotate, where they come from, who uses them after you. Will reddit think you are a normal user when they see your IP or will they think you are *****? Those are two completely different reactions.
4) Can I use a copy of your bot?
Of course not, why would I want Reddit to think that you are me?
5) How do I make a 100% stealth bot?
Use the best cloaking technology anyone has ever created. Its called the "I don't care about that guy" cloak. So long as you make admins/mods/security not care about you... it is like you are invisible.
6) How do they detect me at all?
You are acting like yourself. As a result, reddit thinks you are you. (And they are correct 99.9% of the time)
7) Reddit knows all about me. What do I do? How do I escape their witch-hunt?
Go back to basics. Get a new device, make a new email, use a new IP, make a new reddit account. Do things on reddit you wouldn't normally do. There is no way they could know who you are at that point, not unless the person who sold you the phone is secretly working for them.
Take a deep breath and walk through the process one step at a time. When Reddit eventually figures out who you are and bans you... you will know exactly what they are looking for. The exact detail that lets them separate you from every other person who has ever logged in.
Then change it. It will be as if you suddenly disappeared from their vision.
8) How do I avoid attracting negative attention?
Just imagine yourself in their position. When those admin mails hit, they have to take action. They have to fight you SPECIFICALLY. Stay off their radar. Be a virus. Find a way to hide in plain sight.
Best of luck yo!
