Cool New People is Broken and SpaceHey's Bot Problem

I'll try to cut down on the sillyspeak because this is starting to become a sorta serious issue? Not that serious though, so. I'm still gonna be silly.

The long and short of it is that SpaceHey's Cool New People tab is broken and hardly ever actually GIVES me cool new people to talk to. In part, this is because I'm extremely (perhaps even, unusually) picky with who I do and don't friend, but it's still rather frustrating that the quality of users who show up in this feed is relatively poor.

It seems that the Cool New People feed prioritizes users that are in these categories:

-Currently online
-New to the platform
-Have been online very recently
-Have 5 or fewer friends

Usually, the feed will have people who fall into at least 2 or 3 of these categories in my experience. And this is, in theory, an excellent idea, since it pushes new users less integrated into the website's social structure to the forefront, and the lack of systems like profile search tags makes building a new social life on the site from scratch somewhat difficult. However, in practice, it just means that this feed gets filled up annoying bots or strange, bizarro promo profiles. And in this case, I think these profiles are bizarro in... a bad way...

The SpaceHey profile that brought me to write this blog post was this one:

https://spacehey.com/profile?id=2852845

Favor Home Solutions.

Now, I have zero clue what the fuck this is supposed to be, exactly. At first, I thought it was a strange (but possibly effective) phishing scheme, but after checking the link provided on the profile, it seems to be relatively safe? I still wouldn't recommend clicking it (or worse, imputing personal information into this website.) If I had to guess, this is either the world's lamest troll prank, or the work of one of the dumbest, most overpaid PR guys I've ever seen. Still though, it's a kind of hilarious example of something that'll become a real problem on the platform if it isn't addressed.

It sucks to say, but the Dead Internet theory is about as much of a "theory" as fucking gravity at this point, so botted profiles are inevitable. Even the original MySpace had an issue with bots and malicious profiles. But the HTML-based nature of these sorts of site's customization leads to them being especially vulnerable to attacks from bad actors. Sure, the weird Favor Home Solutions bot might be funny and harmless right now, but it could definitely be a sign of more harmful ones to come.

So, basically, I'd recommend users to simply stay diligent and be wary of empty-looking or suspicious profiles in the Cool New People tab. Try finding new people to talk to through the forums, or join a group, or even just scroll through the Browse tab to find people with similar interests (while staying safe of course.)

I might make another post some other time about internet safety, depending on how strongly I feel the need for it is, because these sorts of websites are legitimately very dangerous if you aren't careful about how to operate them.

Stay safe out there, y'all.