Dumb And Dumber

dumb and dumber

Okay, I think I found the "scout" bot account that followed me. I blocked it early this morning and haven't received any more bot follows since then (before I was getting two to three every 12 hours).

To explain, in the previous bot plague it was discovered that individual upticks in bot follows happened after you were followed by a scout account. These were a bit difficult to find because they weren't empty accounts; they often (but not always) have default avatars, but sometimes had a tagline and background, convincing usernames, and had just enough reblog activity that a cursory scroll through their account wouldn't get them instantly blocked. They were really difficult to suss out unless you didn't have many followers and could inspect every recent follow. The telltale signs for the ones I always find are that:

They don't have anything in common with my interests, even though they follow me,

They never tag or comment, or the tags are suspiciously generic with no personality or system,

They followed me without any interaction (a human *usually* tends to like/reblog a bunch of your stuff before following)

(Had to see this on desktop) Their reblog activity is centered around the date they followed me, and does not extend far beyond that.

If you have the time and inclination, look through your followers list (gonna say since the Twitter exodus started, so late October/early November), on desktop if you can, and inspect your recent followers.

The tables have turned against him 

Tony and Ezekiel video live rent free in my head

Excerpt from Chapter 16 of Fool’s Paradise! 

Which also just happens to be a reference to Stu making chocolate pudding at 4am