Occasionally I get obvious spam on MySpace. Click on a profile, and there’s an ad; or else ‘Tom’ is the only Friend. These get reported as spam. But in the last week I’ve gotten Friend requests from legitimate-looking pages. One was from a 17-year-old ‘gangsta’ rapper kid in Oklahoma. A few more similar requests came in after that. One more was from a guy in Texas who had a dirt bike on his page. These people have lots of Friends. Since I can’t figure out why they’d send a Friend request to a random person with a Filmmaking page, I don’t approve them.
Question: Why would I be getting these random requests? Have these people’s accounts been hacked, and they don’t know requests are being sent?
maybe there just trying to beef up there friend lists by mass adding random people. you’ve said that they already have a lot of friends on their lists, so obviously it may be working. They are probably doing this to advertise something personal, like that gangster rapper might want you to listen to his new MP3 or come to his next ‘gig’.
Is your profile set to private. Sometimes people just want to see your pics
No, not private. I use MySpace for networking, so I want filmmakers to see my stuff. marochko might have a point, but since the requests come without comment I don’t see why they would send to me.
Just got another one; again from a rapper site. (I think. Can’t read the page.) Something I forgot to mention is that I have no additional profile viewings. So it seems that these requests are being sent without anyone going to my profile and clicking on ‘Add to Friends’.
His page probably got phished.
People use social networks for a variety of different purposes - some just use them as intended - as a way to organise, document and share their data, friends and favourite stuff.
Others exploit them for various purposes beyond their original design - for example, some people use them to generate traffic to their content - either for its own sake, or because more traffic equals more money.
In order to do this, it’s usually necessary to become a ‘power user’ on the social network - to have lots of friends, to bookmark or vote on lots of content, to appear to be doing a lot on the site - because the system for ranking things (not sure how Myspace deals with stuff like this, if at all) takes more notice of power users.
Oddly enough, I’ve noticed the exact same thing over the last couple of weeks. In addition to my usual “adult” themed friendspam, I’ve received many friend requests from hobbyist (not big name) rappers around the country. Out of curiosity, I friended about 5 of them and none have sent any comment spam or flooded my bulletin space. I don’t know how it would be organized, but I’m guessing it may be a legitimate loose-knit network of up and coming rappers that are scouring MySpace for new listeners, possibly with some type of bot(?).
As long as they don’t abuse the system, I think it’s a great way to build up a fanbase. I mean, it’s no more annoying than having to click Deny or Spam on 20 budding porn stars a day.
Guessing that it’s a bot, since profile views don’t increase, I’ve turned on Captcha.