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Reverse engineering the obfuscated TikTok VM

(github.com)
412 points xfeeefeee | 1 comments | 21 Apr 25 01:59 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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ronsor ◴[21 Apr 25 05:12 UTC] No.43748671[source]▶
There is no legitimate reason for a social media platform to employ this much obfuscation.
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miohtama ◴[21 Apr 25 06:08 UTC] No.43748881[source]▶
It's to keep bots away and not turn to be another Twitter.
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dns_snek ◴[21 Apr 25 06:17 UTC] No.43748916[source]▶
That's probably not the goal. There are bots advertising illegal services (e.g. ads for "hacking services", illegal drugs) in most comment sections. If you report these comments, 99.9% of the time the report will be rejected with "no violations found" and the spam stays up.
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bolognafairy ◴[21 Apr 25 06:52 UTC] No.43749060{3}[source]▶
That doesn’t mean that it’s “probably not the intention”.
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dns_snek ◴[21 Apr 25 08:25 UTC] No.43749539{4}[source]▶
The balance of evidence suggests otherwise. If they cared about spam bots they would take action when spammers are handed to them on a silver platter. The kinds of spammers who will leave 30 identical comments advertising illegal services, not some weird moderation corner case.

If you ever end up on a video that's related to drugs, there will be entire chains of bots just advertising to each other and TikTok won't find any violations when reported. But sure, I'm sure they care a whole lot about not ending up like Twitter.

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1. TheDong ◴[21 Apr 25 12:14 UTC] No.43751049{5}[source]▶
So you're saying that TikTok's support team doing a poor job of handling reports is proof that the engineering team wasn't tasked with reducing spam by writing code obfuscation?

TikTok is a huge company, evidence of what the support department does or doesn't do has only minor bearing on the whole company, and basically none on the engineering department.

The thing that seems most likely to me is that they care about spam, the engineering department did this one thing, and the support department is either overworked or cares less. Or really efficient which is why you only see "a lot of spam", not "literally nothing but spam".