I noticed these accounts are following a lot of ppl on Spotify including me nd it doesn’t seem like I’m the only one from looking on social media. Does anyone have an answer to this? Bots maybe, ppl spam following?
one of the following:
- attention seeker
- scraper bot
to elaborate, this is a old facebook trick. You get a friend request from some hot looking girl and you accept cuz you are horny and in your 20’s and it says they are actually already friends with your pal Dave! they even chat with you a little bit sometimes, very blandly and generically…
but now they can see all of your friends, posts you have set to friends only, etc. It’s a wedge to bypass the host services privacy settings and nothing more. Those accounts can see things that google can’t see and there’s money in them there profiles. They use the fact that they are now friends with you AND Dave to more easily target people you both know and the botnet grows.
Damn… I never even considered that being a thing but it makes so much sense hearing it.
There are multiple copies of them too it seems because the ones that are following me have slightly different display names
I checked after seeing this post. Same for me. They had a slightly different names
The two (also slightly different names) I see on my Spotify have a “Viral songs on tiktok” playlist in their profile. So it’s probably a way to spread/spam songs around?
… you can follow people on Spotify?
Yup
What does it do? Do you like… see what they’re playing? You listen along or something?
Not a lot. Yes you can see what they are playing and they use it to make recommendations for you.
I think the primary motivator for Spotify is just data scraping. Everybody wants to know your circle of friends in order to advertise better towards you.
They would have to follow 44 people a day for 6 years straight to reach 98,000
If they follow 98,000 people per day, it would take one day
And if my grandmother had wheels she’d be a bicycle
But… I’m not a big fan of bicycles…
I’m a big fan of your grandmother.
is there a limit of how many people they can follow in a day? Why not 500?
It does not seem so
Literally noticed this last night on my Spotify
Most likely bots for either data analysis or playlist generation.
Wouldn’t it mean they have 98k followers? Not that they follow 98k users? Bad UI?
My question with all this is why hasn’t everyone switched this off in the settings from the first moment they made an account?
It’s no wonder we’ve become a commodity to the services we use, people just allow it to happen.
I have set the list of people following me and the ones i follow on private now. This seems to be the only useful thing they could scrape. Why would i care if they can see what music i listen to? It’s not like they can see my personal info and link that or is it?
One of them is following me, but with a bunch of extra spaces after the exclamation point.
I don’t usually check my followers, but I happened to be in there a couple days ago. The only person following me then was my wife, so this bot/spam is relatively new.
