The XHamster Wikipedia Page Is Suddenly Immensely Popular, and No One Knows Why (theoutline.com)

An anonymous reader shares a report: At the beginning of June I started to notice that XHamster, the third most popular adult website after Pornhub and XVideos, had one of the most viewed Wikipedia pages. On May 29, XHamster's Wikipedia page went from receiving around 100,000 views to 200,000. By June 1, it was getting more than 300,000 views a day for no apparent reason. There haven't been any viral stories about XHamster lately. There are no controversies about the page itself that would have prompted sustained attention or an edit war. [...] Pageviews on XHamster's Wikipedia page, however, has been bonkers throughout the month of June for no obvious reason. That's according to a pageview analysis tool from Wikimedia Labs, and confirmed by a Wikipedia spokesperson. I reached out to Wikipedia to see if it could shed some light on this puzzle. In an email, a spokesperson verified that the pageviews were accurate but that they didn't know what was causing the surge. Wikipedia's spokesperson pointed out that the edit activity, unlike its pageviews, has remained steady.

Comments

i visited xhamster once

[FudRucker]

and there were not any hamsters, but lots of poor people that could not afford to even buy clothes to wear

Re:i visited xhamster once

[EvilSS]

and there were not any hamsters, but lots of poor people that could not afford to even buy clothes to wear

Oh there were hamsters, you just didn't look in the right category!

Botnet?

[Anonymous Coward]

My first thoughts are a botnet using a wikipedia page to check for instructions (since wikipedia is unlikely to be blocked)....otherwise, random IP accesses to a page like that would be very weird.

Re:Botnet?

[Anonymous Coward]

If it is on mobile I reckon it might be Chromes Awesomebar.

People enter: xhamster which results in a google search. With safe search on wikipedia is the top entry.

Another surge on July 5 happened

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

It is called slashdot effect. It used to be huge, back in the day when people were the first to welcome the overlords and talking about how the government controls commerce in Soviet Union and people had check marked lists in fixed point font describing why the proposed spam fighting solutions won't work.

Re:Another surge on July 5 happened

[Critical Facilities]

Hey hey hey, now wait a minute.....

Everyone knows in Soviet Russia, the commerce controls YOU.

Re:Another surge on July 5 happened

[technoid_]

If only I had a beowulf cluster of the posts.

They've really started branding their videos

[Anonymous Coward]

XHamster has started aggressively branding and marking the videos on their site. These videos are then uploaded elsewhere and suddenly, people see them. Given they started doing this about 2-3 months ago, it would coincide perfectly with this surge.

Re:They've really started branding their videos

[KingRatMass]

Fuck you... Pay for your porn then!

Back in my day, we had to use Zmodem to download porn PICTURES. It once took two days to masturbate because mom kept making phone calls and interrupting my download. We sometimes had to wait 16 hours from the time we saw nipple until we got bush.

Fucking ungrateful assholes... Get off my lawn!

Malware/Dead drop

[henry.cow]

Gut guess is the page being used to help infected clients find their C&C server, like this - http://www.businessinsider.com/russian-hackers-turla-communicate-malware-britney-spears-instagram-comment-2017-6

Probably for C&C

[wulfhere]

Something like this is my guess:

https://arstechnica.com/securi...

Viral advertising

[LetterRip]

Perhaps the person 'noticing' the phenomenon, is the originator of the phenomenon and trying to increase traffic to the said porn sites by calling attention to this 'mystery'.