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Reverse engineering the obfuscated TikTok VM

(github.com)
412 points xfeeefeee | 2 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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wpietri ◴[21 Apr 25 12:28 UTC] No.43751194{5}[source]▶
A large company is much less cohesive than you realize. You can't reliably reason about the goals of one part because another part isn't consistent. This particular difference could easily be explained by insufficient funding to moderation, which is endemic in social media.
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1. dns_snek ◴[22 Apr 25 08:16 UTC] No.43760084{6}[source]▶
I've said this twice already, it's not that another part "isn't consistent" (I would agree that this is to be expected), they're CONSISTENTLY acting in the opposite manner than is being speculated here and I subscribe to the "purpose of a system is what it does" world view.
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2. wpietri ◴[22 Apr 25 13:25 UTC] No.43761843[source]▶
If you really subscribed to POSIWID, you wouldn't be making arguments like "That's probably not the goal", as that's nonsensical from the POSIWID perspective.

The nominal goal of the code could well be bots at the same time the POSIWID purpose is about the exec impressing his superiors and the developers feeling smart and indulging their pet technical interests. Similarly, the nominal goal of the abuse reporting system would include spam, even if the POSIWID analysis would show that the true current purpose is to say they're doing something while keeping costs low.

So again, I don't think you have a lot of understanding of how large companies work. Whereas I, among other things, ran an anti-abuse engineering team at Twitter back in the day, so I'm reasonably familiar with the dynamics.