I have a YouTube channel, with my videos averaging 5-10 views each. Sometimes a video will go all gangbusters and get 25 views.
Every few videos or so will get a comment from one of 3 different users, each commenting me on the video and saying, “Let’s be friends” or “I want to be friends.”
These commenters have no channels of their own (or if they do, they have little content), so they’re not trying to get me to subscribe and promote their own videos. YouTube doesn’t have a “Friends” feature (as far as I know). I don’t even know how I could be “friends” with these guys even if I wanted to – they don’t provide any way of contacting them outside of YouTube comments.
What’s the play here? Am I getting fawning admiration from lonely 12-year-olds in Kalamazoo (my channel is not for children)? Is this Phase One of a long con that’s so long I don’t even know it’s a con? Is there some culture where asking random strangers to be your friend is a thing?
It is believed they are trying to build a large subscriber base so they can sell the channel on.
The ‘Tom/Tim’ bot that recently got deleted had over half a million subscribers on one of its channels - they seem to manage to do this by not publishing videos regularly - people click back through the comment and see a few videos that they initially uploaded (which have enticing clickbait thumbnails like ‘how to grow your channel FAST’ - and people subscribe.
But the fake channel doesn’t publish any more videos (if it did, people would quickly unsubscribe, because the content they start with is actually pretty shite) - people don’t typically prune their subscriptions until such time as one of the channels to which they are subscribed puts out content they don’t like - so their sub count just grows, and apparently fast.
I’m going to say this wrong, as I was only half-attentively paying attention to this. (a video on this came on in the background after I forgot to swap to another news video).
Somehow, if those posts are replied to, it allows the spambot to collect the usernames, and/or then post comments as that user. I’m not quite sure if the accounts are hijacked or not.
Those names can then post the same comment on other users’ videos, building up their comment counts, getting them better revenue.
If you search for the topic on Youtube, there are a number of commenters that have posted in-depth videos on this topic.