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The biggest cottage industry on BlueSky is building accounts to be sold to "Twitter elite" who don't want to go through the drudgery of, you know, earning followers.

These spam accounts usually take the form of "cute animal picture" aggregators, though I recently got one focused on bonsai - which is a hilarious first for me.

They mass follow new arrivals to the platform, hoping to get a followback from people grateful for the attention.

Then they "follower-farm" - weeding out those who haven't followed back and following more.

Once they've achieved the desired number of followers - still low as BlueSky doesn't have 100k DAUs yet - they start unfollowing until they have the "elite" ratio, then sell.

Don't laugh - something similar is happening in the fedi

My camera shoots fascists 2y ago

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Can you explain the last step, about the elite ratio? I'm trying to get my head around this. Also, once they have it all built, how/where do they sell it?

I guess it's not surprising that it would be happening on the fedi too, since clout chasers gonna clout chase no matter where they are, but I wonder what the relative values are of buying one of these accounts on the various platforms? Like, is there a dark web marketplace somewhere to comparison shop 😂

I also wonder what all the people who followed "@ toads every hour" or whatever think of suddenly noticing that they're following "@ Joe Schmoe" instead.

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Discussion

CrazyMyra 2y ago

nostr:npub145umrlfuf9cppkgkzf08438peevqs8lqrswsu27w3txkeh4n2yysathq7w The last step is a hangover from the Twitter algorithms, which - thanks to a litany of stupid small decisions originally designed to help all real users - gave an advantage to those who had far more followers than those they followed.

A high ratio was also seen as a status symbol because it resembled that of genuine celebrities.

The algorithmic feeds hid those changes from Toad to Schmoe. You got to see Schmoe's tweets because you were following them, but you thought it was because they were popular.

Yes, there are several marketplaces for such accounts. The more public-facing side is for big ones - 25k followers and up - but there are plenty that are used as sock-puppets for misinformation that have a few thousand followers.