What is a bot in slang. Let's figure out who a bot is? How to make money on bots

The word “robot” is said to have been coined by the writer Karel Capek, and the word means “work.” Since then, the word has taken root in all languages, but in the youth Internet environment it was cut off to “bot.” The visual recognition of the word has also undergone changes: this was once the name given to futuristic humanoid electronic creatures, but in the real world this type did not justify itself. For example, famous Japanese robots can hardly climb steps or walk at all, but they have remarkable achievements with facial expressions. Industrial robots don't resemble anything at all.

Bots in the electronic environment are controlled programs, often not only capable of fulfilling certain specific requests, but also showing the beginnings of artificial intelligence. In this regard, a bot is used for simple and tedious work, where it can cope more accurately and faster than a human: in systems for mass mailing of correspondence, when analyzing sites for changes, during automatic registrations. Particularly smart bots can even engage in trading on exchanges using sets of rules. Bots are often used in good intentions, but even more often they have harmful functions. For example, many viruses and worms can install bots on computers, and on a certain day and time they begin to carry out distributed DDOS attacks on unwanted services and sites, “overwhelming” the servers. Bots can roam the Internet, look for holes in installed software and collect confidential information used to hack systems. Many players in online games use bots to achieve commercial goals: programs can collect artifacts and fight with human players much more effectively. With the development of AI, it is becoming increasingly difficult to combat this phenomenon, because bots have even learned to chat in chats and forums, forming completely natural phrases and thereby heating up their biological opponents.

Bots are especially often used to collect current email addresses from various online sources in order to then send advertising spam. One of the ways to combat them is to use a captcha (captcha) - entering data from a picture that a person can easily identify, but a bot can no longer do. Such captchas are placed almost everywhere: when registering clients, when downloading files, when commenting on blogs. But cunning bots know how to bypass such protection: they cut out the captcha and send it to special services, where people can recognize them for money. In response, new types of captcha appear, where it is sometimes necessary to demonstrate remarkable knowledge, which makes it inconvenient for real users to visit resources. So bots have pretty much tarnished their reputation on the Internet.

Often, owners of VKontakte groups and public pages come to me with the question: “How can I quickly and cheaply recruit subscribers to a group?” They also ask about who VKontakte bots and offers are. I answer that the “fast and cheap” thing is not for me, since I work with groups of my customers exclusively using white-collar methods using paid promotion methods.

Who are bots?

Work in in social networks and in particular VKontakte is a lot of work that requires a serious investment of time, effort and money. Entrepreneurs often go to social networks without understanding how everything works. This is why people fall for dubious offers where they are offered “real live subscribers” for very modest money. Let us try to figure out what kind of “live” subscribers these are and where they come from.

Do you know who bots are and how they differ from offers?

Bots are personal VKontakte pages filled with false information and performing automatic tasks. Who creates these very bots? There are special programs that either create such pages or hack the pages of real people.

Who are the offers?

A few years ago, bots were actively used on VKontakte, but today they have been almost completely replaced by offers. The social network VKontakte has a negative attitude towards inanimate accounts, and if you manage to fill your group with bots, it will simply be blocked. You will then have a long and persistent conversation with the administration and explain where you got these bots.

Offers, unlike bots, are real people who are ready to join a certain VKontakte group and perform certain actions in it, for example, like, repost, or write some comment. Why do they do this? For a fee, of course.

Here is a screenshot from a site where people are invited to earn money on VKontakte by performing certain targeted actions.

How much do offers cost?

Prices for offers vary widely. To be honest, I myself have never used services for recruiting offers into a group, but finding them online is not at all difficult. Go to the search engine and enter the search query “Buy VKontakte offers” and get acquainted with the prices. Here is a screenshot that I made by looking at one of the sites providing such services.

But I want to warn you right away, by ordering offers, you risk ending up in the same situation as the author of this post in the discussion thread on the forum. That is, after joining your community, people will hang there as an absolutely dead audience, and this is still in best case scenario. And in the worst case, they will begin to unfollow en masse and turn into “dogs”.

Why bots and offers are useless for business

Why is this happening? The answer is simple - these people are absolutely not interested in your group and your business. They received their reward and forgot about you. And even if the cost of one such subscriber is much cheaper than the target one received when launching paid advertising, the question arises: why do you need these offers at all?

Some authors of VKontakte projects believe that joining a group with several thousand subscribers is much better than joining an empty one. But the whole problem is that in order to fool people, you will also have to imitate at least minimal activity in your group. And you will also have to pay for this...And again, this activity will be fake. That is why I never buy offers anywhere I don't recommend it to you either.

Why do they buy offers?

If you want your VKontakte business to develop and make a profit, you need to learn not to buy offers, but to work competently in this social network. Make your group interesting to your subscribers and learn to attract a real live target audience.

Some owners of VKontakte groups want to buy offers in order to get to the TOP of results in the internal search of VKontakte. On this occasion I will say the following. If in order to reach the TOP you need to recruit up to 10 thousand subscribers to the group, then it is quite possible to cope with this task without any offers, and in a fairly short time (provided, of course, you have a certain budget).

For example, the group “SECRETS OF CHINESE MEDICINE” is in the top three in search results for internal search on VKontakte among 410 communities. And this group was recruited exclusively by white methods.

If, in order to get to the TOP, you need to gain 100 thousand subscribers or more, recruiting offers is generally a thankless task. Why? Yes, because the lack of activity in a group with such a serious number of subscribers will most likely work against you.

People will have a question: why in such a large group no one is interested in the product, asks questions, or leaves reviews. Will you imitate the “movement” in your group? Maybe then you’ll buy it yourself?

Yes, and such a picture in the subscribers of your community will also not work to build trust in you and your business:

So, my friends, I want to warn you against unnecessary and senseless spending. Do not believe promises about recruiting a target and solvent audience into the group for little money.
It's all a scam.

If you really want to develop your VKontakte business, then study paid advertising. And don't expect instant results! If you study and work, the results will definitely come, but not immediately.

If you have any questions, don't hesitate to ask! I'll be happy to answer.

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With the modern trend of information technology development, more and more methods of manipulation are appearing human consciousness. There are many tools and various platforms, but social networks have become the main springboard for such actions. Now we will talk about the so-called social bots - special programs created to imitate the behavior of people on social networks. The purpose of these programs may vary, but most often they are used by Internet marketers and cybercriminals.

Not long ago, a group of scientists from the University of British Columbia, led by Professor Yazan Bushmaf, conducted a large-scale experiment to identify vulnerabilities in large social networks. The experimental part of the study lasted two months. During this time, from just one Facebook network, scientists were able to obtain more than 250 GB of users’ personal information. For these purposes, about a hundred bots were developed with a certain array of scripts, through which they could impersonate real people.

The programs instantly created pages for themselves with photos and personal information. Bots could also participate in dialogues, periodically change statuses and send messages with invites. As a result, in two months they were able to send 5,053 messages requesting personal data, of which 80% had a positive result. To prevent Facebook's anti-spam protection from working, bots sent no more than 25 messages per day. To increase user trust, the programs used a social engineering technique called the triadic closure principle, which involves making mutual friends.

As a result, the experiment showed that the protection of most social networks is not ready for large-scale data theft attacks. 8 out of 10 users fall for the tricks of social bots without knowing it. However, Facebook management said that the results of the experiment were greatly exaggerated, and their Facebook Immune protection system is constantly being improved to detect fake profiles and new types of cyber attacks.

Main types and tasks of social bots

Technical bots. Their structure almost always contains specially prescribed programs. Their main tasks include accumulating likes and monosyllabic comments under the desired post, creating a large number of friends to increase trust in the bot, and distributing publications through reposts. This is the most popular look bots, which is used in any social networks, be it Facebook, VKontakte or Instagram.

Combat bots. They are required primarily to reduce the reputation or block a certain page on a social network by sending a large number of complaints and negative comments.

Drain bots. Sometimes special bots are used to disseminate this or that information. At first they behave like real users, but at a certain point they begin to disseminate insider information. Subsequently, many online publications and media will refer to this fake source.

Hyperbolic bots. This is perhaps the most subtle and sophisticated type of social bots, which is designed to gain trust in the clients of the customer’s competitor with the further creation of anti-advertising. At first glance, the fake user fully supports the ideology and views of the opponent. But at a certain point, it begins to spread hyperbolic (exaggerated) information. For example, a bot penetrates a group of fans of a certain car brand and reports that all owners of cars from other companies are stupid people without taste. It is supported by other bots. As a result, many potential buyers will begin to be very skeptical of all owners of these cars and, accordingly, of the entire brand as a whole.

Intelligent combat bots or simply “trolls”. These bots are interesting because they use their own invested intelligence. That is, the program, with the necessary embedded data, is sent to the information war to promote third-party opinions. The main task of such a bot is to communicate on highly specialized topics in a specific topic or message thread. In addition, such a bot can often resort to insults or provocative statements towards other users, thereby diverting attention from the main topic of the conversation. This type of bot is most popular when discussing political and social phenomena.

Bots from sites. Usually, little-known companies resort to help by creating an account for a virtual person. Typically, such bots are inactive and easy to identify.

How to recognize a bot?

To protect yourself and not be attacked by bots, you need to know the main points that you should pay special attention to.

• The account was created recently, but it actively publishes meaningless photos, links and posts;
• The account was created recently, it is maintained by an unknown person, but it already has a large number of friends with pages almost identical to this profile;
• The account was recently registered. There is no information or photos on him, but he actively communicates with other users and in groups;
• The account owner never responds to comments under his own posts. Most often these are bots from websites. They can be easily identified when trying to engage in a simple dialogue with them;
• The account was created a long time ago. He was inactive for a long time, after which he suddenly began publishing dozens of posts a day. This often happens if the account has been hacked.

Therefore, if you are convinced that you have come across a bot, do not be lazy and send a complaint about it to the administration of the social network. It is known that today more than 60% of Internet traffic is generated by bots and even mislead smart person a completely feasible task. The most interesting thing is that the services of social bots are used by thousands of people around the world, sometimes for very bad purposes. It is possible to fight them, but most likely it is useless, since new and more sophisticated ways of deceiving people will always appear.

Humanity strives to free its life as much as possible from unnecessary problems. Therefore, he comes up with various robots ready to perform any programmed work. Sometimes it turns out so well that you can only gasp! However, many do not understand what we're talking about. "Who is this bot?" - they ask. Let's consider who, or rather, what it is, what “it” is intended for and summarize the data.

1. What is this anyway?

As already mentioned, at the moment there are many robots (bots for short). They can perform a volume of work that a human could never do. However, they have a significant drawback. They still, thank God, do not know how to think. This means that they directly depend on the person. That is why the question: “Who is a bot?” slightly incorrect, since artificial intelligence does not exist at the moment.

2. What are they for?

The Internet is a huge network in which people can not only conduct free time, search for the necessary information and have fun, but also perform commercial actions. As a rule, in order to have successful business in the virtual space, it is necessary to notify

other Internet users about your site. To automate this process, special programs have been invented. For example, there are bots for ICQ. Their tasks are simple. First, they are added to several thousand users, then send them the same type of messages. Several recipients can follow the link, thus completing the program's task. There are, of course, similar things for other purposes, but they are less popular. These include an answering machine for an ISQ agent. Translator bots are no less popular. True, only a small part of users are ready to resort to its services. The fact is that the quality of the translation leaves much to be desired. It is worth saying that large financial resources are involved in this direction, so the situation should soon change for the better. Don’t forget about all kinds of online games, the developers of which, in order to recreate a realistic atmosphere, create robotic rivals whose actions are calculated by a computer.

3. Position of bots on the Internet

It was previously mentioned for what purpose these incomprehensible, mysterious wards of the computer were introduced. After all, five years ago no one knew who a bot was. However, now most people know that it is scammers who resort to the services of such programs. Yes, don’t forget that someone else writes them and gets paid for it. With the help of such assistants, you can quickly raise your level in the game, automatically put hearts on social networks, translate some texts, download music, earn money by automatically clicking on links, and much more. There is a completely justified opinion that rates all actions of automatic programs with the lowest score. And we should not forget that the Internet was originally created for the exchange of information between people. But when a programmed machine works under the image of a person, which absolutely does not care what to do, then the original task, as they say, comes to naught.

Now you know who a bot is. In short, it is a special program; its goal is to make life easier for some people, although sometimes other Internet users may suffer because of it.