That Tuesday morning email run in 2016 still haunts me

I used to moderate a busy forum thread back around 2016, and one morning at 7 AM I got 47 replies that all said the exact same thing, word for word, like someone copy pasted a script. At first I thought it was a weird prank, but when I checked the profiles they all joined within the same hour and had zero history. That was before bots got good, I guess, because now the fake ones sound way more human than some of my old students. Has anyone else seen those weird copy paste waves hit a thread, or was it just my tiny corner of the internet?

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rodriguez.mia18d ago

Oh, 2016, that was actually the year those "click farm" style bot scripts started getting really common. I remember seeing a wave like that on a cooking forum I used to lurk on, except it was 63 comments all saying "great recipe, thanks for sharing" and every single account had a random number name like "user_48291". The only reason I know it wasn't a prank is because the forum admin later posted that all the IPs traced back to the same server block in a data center, not a bunch of different homes. That was also the same year people figured out you could buy 10k fake followers for like five bucks, so the timing makes sense.