Why are so many people joining the giveaway at once?

Because it's hard to do it at twice.

Yes, a high part are bots (autojoiners) and only a tiny part are so dumb to activate on top the thanks script that make them ultra visible. The thanks script is allowed, which is complete stupid because it is a additional part of the autojoiner program that can but must not be enabled.
If you raise the min. level for a public GA, this amount get lowered.

The only one that could do something against them is the owner of this site (cg) but he don't care since 6 years+

The other thing you can do is to blacklist such accounts, which have only a effect when you create own GAs.
And/or to join groups that check which users can enter their group (like my own).

I mean, there are thousands of users here. If a hundred in a minute see your giveaway, and a hundred enter your giveaway, it may seems like a lot

I fear a big part of the answer will indeed be bots, but I guess there is also the fact that with over a million users that means that there are only so many times that a user can look for GAs to join... Assuming only 1% off all users checks the site exactly once each day, that still means that 8 people check at the same minute. Not even accounting for uneven distribution of timezones etc.

But yeah, I I don't remember the last GA I made that did not have a level or group or puzzle protection 🤷‍♂️

EDIT: Hm, but the 1% seemed like a very random guess and the million level 0 users felt wrong too... If we change it to 176099 Level1+ users and an activity of 10(100)% then once a day would be 12(122) on the same minute

There's a lot of bots and the issue is barely being addressed lately, if at all. Although sometimes it may just look like botting, for instance when you open several GA's in new tabs before entering them and closing each tab.

You can make out most botters if you look a bit deeper though and logs don't lie, so the problem could've been addressed better if there was a motivation to do it, like it's already been done in the past.
Reports are a waste of time as mods prefer dealing with other tickets, understandably (and they want you to line a lot of time-consuming proof by yourself). The concept itself is ridiculous as it could've been automated.

What you can do is raise the level of your GA's to partly mitigate the issue (there's botters and exploiters at all levels) or gift in exclusive groups, which unfortunately isn't fair to honest low-level users.

As other people mentioned, lots of bots.
It's been years since I won a game, I think. Too many bots to compete against.

As site owner is a lazy and? greedy f... only solution is to abandon concept of community and keep your own giveaways behind different layers of bot protections. Alternatively you're donating to people who employ algorithms for their personal gain and make you look stupid as a giveaway creator.

Every time I make a public giveaway, there's like 50 people joining inside an hour, regardless of the level req, game given away, starting date... I honestly don't think that even with 5 million users real people can scan the lists for giveaways so far in the future, what do they skip to page 7 by default?

I see why a user once made fake giveaways stating that they are going to blacklist everyone that enters it, just to try and weed out some bots.

I have seen some interesting change in number of people joined into a to giveaway on public giveaways that are made to start several days or an entire week in the future. Presumably they skip all the people who only look at very new listings, and probably a lot of bots that sift by time.

Also, it's pretty cheap for a user to reach a level 2 giveaway level, which would sift out a lot of free bots.

Don't question the will of your robot overlords, meatbag.

Thanks for the info, but how do I easily deal with this if I only have 1 level?

I, for one, always check the site using the "New" tab. If many people are like me (and have no life like me, staying at SG a lot of the time :( :( :) ), that means tons of users joining in the first one or two hours.

There is a second peak when the GA is about to end, I imagine because that brings it to the top of the main page.

Other than that, yeah, bots also join GAs as soon as they pop up, I guess.

Cheers!

Edit: actually, reading the other comments.... yeah, a SMART bot would NOT join the GA as soon as it starts.

A couple of things --

First, while there are certainly bots on this site... the issue you're describing is not necessarily a sign of bots. The main giveaway page shows giveaways in order of their ending time, so when your giveaway has just a few minutes left, it'll be on the front page. And that will usually result in a bunch of people entering... generally all around the same time. Your Color Splash giveaway, for example, ended at 6:54 and there were a ton of giveaways at 6:52 and a few at 6:53. That's not necessarily bots, it's just people seeing the giveaway on the front page.

Second, in my opinion, it's just not worth spending too much mental energy on trying to figure out if your giveaways are going to bots. There are some low-level things you can do, as others have suggested (raise your GA level, join groups and do group giveaways, do invite-only giveaways, etc) but I would just say, try not to spend too much time thinking about bots.

CG really should do something about it.
Before it's too late.

View attached image.

I kinda assume the botting on this website is probably less than 5% but there's some people who make some crazy claims that it's more without being able to provide any proof, like take masafor for instance, last time I talked to him his data was this at some point, this at some point, and he was the one who claimed to have worked in a group with others and they had reliable data, and yet, it didn't add up. If you see the same people joining multiple giveaways in a row it's likely because they don't have the game, also they might have just opened sg and those two users are active at the same time looking for giveaways. What makes them bots if they both enter two giveaways for games neither own within the same minute?

There's some people who suggest you will get less bots joining a group, I think this is braindead obvious, but that doesn't mean all the public giveaways are bots like the suggest. Think about it, why do you get less bots in a group? Well it requires social interaction, members get denied many times on not having some top 1% profile with high given ratio's for looking sus, and there's more than always a length you have to be on the site for to even join one, and a requirement to give specifically to that group to maintain membership. No botter is gonna spend the time to try and infiltrate your group cause they're not about effort. However you're cutting every single new user out just by asking them to have x months on the site. Then you're cutting everyone who cant' give if they need a ratio. Then you're cutting everyone who's not a top 1% profile because they didn't invest their life savings into steam. So where are those users? They're in public giveaways. Many don't care to interact with you. Heck when you go join a random giveaway website to enter to win a laptop or something, how many of them have comment sections and requirements you make a giveaway for something in return and profiles to look at ratios. Some people just want to enter a giveaway come back later when they earn their points and spend them again. There's the other side of the userbase who wants to trade games within each other in those groups with the pretext of giveaways, you can find like 500 groups doing this atm. That's fine, but it's toxic to say the users who can't or don't give out are bots and if you want to avoid bots you gotta join their fucking pyramid scheme.

Lucky you, you aren't the only person in the world yet. There's 1440 minutes in a day. This means if we only had 1440 daily active users each could come on the site for 1 minute to enter giveaways and come back later. If we just double that to 2880 users, now you can have 2 users for each minute on the site daily, and the same 2 users could enter the same giveaways for an entire minute daily and then leave. If you double that, now it's 5760 users daily active on the site for one minute, and now you got 4 people for each minute on the site. Combine that with other factors like peak times, and some users coming multiple times a day to check for new giveaways and you end up with shrinking minutes and more people during certain other minutes explaining why sometimes you might have 50 people at once joining the same two giveaways. I myself check sg more than 1 time a day just because I cap the points really fast and I got nothing to spend them on, but my library is the fault probably.

TLDR: Just because people join a giveaway within minutes of it's launch doesn't mean they are bots.

https://www.steamgifts.com/giveaways/search?type=new

Also, take into the account, that we have an option to show new GAs. Myself, I rarely use, just when I have no GAs to spend my points on, but some not-botting folks may use it more often.

I very rarely see more than a single page's worth of giveaways, and I use ESGST's grid system, so that one page (that is often just 10-15 GAs) is very compact - so when I'm around, I immediately see new giveaways, even ones that end in weeks.

Hey mate.Yes,there are lots of bots on the site.That's why I recommend you to mask/hide your GAs and create invite-only GAs.There are lots of techniques for that.The most simple is adding something like "NOBOTS" in the GA URL as bot protection. Or you can take a look at this GA of mine where I Marked the GA URL Code Bold.Easy for humans,hard for bots.