6 ms·

This is exactly why social networks are far less valuable than properties like Google that started with algorithmic foundations as opposed to rebranding the nex

This is exactly why social networks are far less valuable than properties like Google that started with algorithmic foundations as opposed to rebranding the next geocities. I'll never trust facebooks numbers on their fake profiles especially when Yahoo kills close to 1mil fake profiles every month and while Ashley Madison was rife with them. Reddit started this way too, with tons of bots, fake accounts etc. We just don't know how many fake or synthetic Astroturfed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astroturfing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astroturfing accounts are really out there. I have a close friend that ran a consumer oriented search site with 50 million monthly active users and he showed me that if certain sites, not his, did not make it easy for fake accounts to be auto generated from various advertising groups and spammers, then they just would not get the bloated monthly active user numbers they wanted. Ironically, Google the term "buy facebook accounts". This is the elephant in the room nobody wants to talk about in the social networking space. 50% or more of the social networking profiles out there could be fake given bots, systems and marketplaces that auto generate this stuff in mass amounts to spam and siphon ad dollars. Another way to look at this is based on how and why virus makers target PCs along with how many PCs are currently affected. Not many fake 'searches' are happening compared to fake bots and social networking profiles. Yet another reason why Google makes $70 billion per year.

yclept 11y ago
> Not many fake 'searches' are happening You think similar networks aren't abusing search?
- meeper16 11y ago
  There's a reason I used the term "compared to". And, the difference is in the billions that Google makes and is worth over Facebook aka AOL 2.0.1 A 'fake' or API-driven search is different than a fake social networking profile and it's associated bots.
mattmanser 11y ago
Incidentally, red face for the journalist, it turned out with regards to the Ashley Madison 'fake' profiles, the vast majority of them weren't fake.
- meeper16 11y ago
  That means the bots were real too.
- cwyers 11y ago
  Can you expand on this?
  - emodendroket 11y ago
    Of course not, because it's false.
    - cwyers 11y ago
      You must be new around here if you think people can't expound at length about things that are false.
    - mattmanser 11y ago
      http://techcrunch.com/2015/08/31/ashley-madison-refutes-claims-that-its-site-was-populated-with-fake-female-accounts/ http://techcrunch.com/2015/08/31/ashley-madison-refutes-clai... http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/statement-from-avid-life-media-monday-august-31-2015-300135089.html http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/statement-from-avid-... Care to apologise?
      - emodendroket 11y ago
        Wow, press releases from the company accused of fraudulently generating data in the first place -- how could I not be convinced by that evidence?
  - mattmanser 11y ago
    http://techcrunch.com/2015/08/31/ashley-madison-refutes-claims-that-its-site-was-populated-with-fake-female-accounts/ http://techcrunch.com/2015/08/31/ashley-madison-refutes-clai... http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/statement-from-avid-life-media-monday-august-31-2015-300135089.html http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/statement-from-avid-... This refutation was widely reported, although unsurprisingly not as much as the original cockup.
downandout 11y ago
I personally know the founder of an SEO company that is running around 50 fake searches per second as I type this.
- meeper16 11y ago
  ...and is likely pinging his 5000 or 500,000 fake social networking profiles every second.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
- legutierr 11y ago
  Very interesting. I assume that he is doing that in order to collect up-to-date search result data. Or is he actually attempting to manipulate search results (or AdWords ratings) in some way?
  - halcyondaze 11y ago
    It's to manipulate the 'auto-complete' feature.
    - downandout 11y ago
      Bingo. That, and clicking on results that are further down actually does help propel them higher.
- vorg 11y ago
  Some outfits don't just do fake searches but also fake downloads. E.g. visit https://bintray.com/groovy/maven/groovy/view/statistics#statistics https://bintray.com/groovy/maven/groovy/view/statistics#stat... then click on date range "1 year" and wonder why the daily download numbers suddenly multiplied by 10 in late May. You'll have trouble believing the 2.5 million download number for Groovy from Bintray, and wonder how long they've been running the same ploy with Maven.
eecks 11y ago
Doesn't Google make money off fake clicks on ads?
- meeper16 11y ago
  Not allowing fake ads https://support.google.com/adwordspolicy/answer/6020954?hl=en https://support.google.com/adwordspolicy/answer/6020954?hl=e... is different than allowing fake profiles to boost your monthly active user counts if your a social network.
- nosuchthing 11y ago
  Yes, but they have fairly comprehensive effort to prevent automated ad clicks - http://adage.com/article/digital/inside-google-s-secret-war-ad-fraud/298652/ http://adage.com/article/digital/inside-google-s-secret-war-...
  - geocar 11y ago
    That sort of thing has nothing to do with the type of fraud in the article. Boris Boris sells the contents of the iframe he bought on Doubleclick to Myspace (as "paid traffic"), which in-turn lets Myspace sell it on video exchanges. Google don't care even a little bit about this, since they still make a fortune off the Boris's of the world.
r00fus 11y ago
Apropos: Palantir crows about being able to use multiple sock puppet accounts to spam social networks - "persona management" [1]. It's a big market - and there are vendors who specialize in fake accounts - that means there's a lot of interest/money in being able to fake popularity. The future ground of all social networks is Astroturf. [1] http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/06/23/1218189/-HBGary-Palantir-Prism-Facebook-The-Industrial-Surveillance-Complex http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/06/23/1218189/-HBGary-Pal...
forgetsusername 11y ago
>This is the elephant in the room nobody wants to talk about in the social networking space. Indeed. I was working for a Facebook gaming company around 2010. Through the "recruit a friend" bonuses and "have X friends click this" mechanics, there were incentives to simply make fake accounts to obtain the goals. We looked at our users and figured about half were fake Facebook accounts. I have to imagine the numbers for other companies, like Zynga, were similar, as they used the same mechanics.
- cwyers 11y ago
  From an advertiser's point of view, those fake profiles are still real humans, right? So your ad is still being seen, and those Facebook profiles probably share enough of the social graph with a real Facebook profile that you can still do demographic targeting, no?
  - TheCapn 11y ago
    Not necessarily. I'm not in the SEO or advertising game but intuition tells me that having the same person see an ad twice is less valuable than 2 people seeing the ad. Additionally, as a result "fake" accounts are likely to contain less information advertise to "target" so they're only hitting fake accounts with overly broad appeal and not really creating content that might interest the user on his/her fake profile.
  - forgetsusername 11y ago
    >* those fake profiles are still real humans, right?* This is true. I'm more thinking along the lines of "we have 1 billion active users!" >you can still do demographic targeting, no? This I'm not so sure about. Some targeting, sure. But the fake profiles make it more difficult, since the demographic data is also fake.
    - meeper16 11y ago
      These are completely fake, synthetic profiles. This is why you can buy them here: https://www.google.com/search?q=buy+facebook+accounts&oq=buy+facebook+accounts&aqs=chrome.0.69i59.3415j0j1&sourceid=chrome&es_sm=93&ie=UTF-8 https://www.google.com/search?q=buy+facebook+accounts&oq=buy...
geocar 11y ago
Boris buys "links", not "likes". Some of the companies fulfilling Boris get those links by simply buying iframes on doubleclick, so Google makes money, Boris makes money, and the advertiser gets a comScore cookie to "prove" it's in-demo.
jgalt212 11y ago
yes, lots of scepticism here, but everyone (at least everyone who didn't get down-voted) seemed to buy into FB's claim of 1 billion users in a single day. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10131975 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10131975
- meeper16 11y ago
  Half are bots and there's no incentive for facebook to really find out which accounts are fake, astroturfed, bot-driven and which one's are not. Instagram, with some of its fake accounts, now with its claimed 400million accounts, overlap with facebooks.

yclept 11y ago

> Not many fake 'searches' are happening You think similar networks aren't abusing search?

meeper16 11y ago
There's a reason I used the term "compared to". And, the difference is in the billions that Google makes and is worth over Facebook aka AOL 2.0.1 A 'fake' or API-driven search is different than a fake social networking profile and it's associated bots.

mattmanser 11y ago

Incidentally, red face for the journalist, it turned out with regards to the Ashley Madison 'fake' profiles, the vast majority of them weren't fake.

meeper16 11y ago
That means the bots were real too.
cwyers 11y ago
Can you expand on this?
- emodendroket 11y ago
  Of course not, because it's false.
  - cwyers 11y ago
    You must be new around here if you think people can't expound at length about things that are false.
  - mattmanser 11y ago
    http://techcrunch.com/2015/08/31/ashley-madison-refutes-claims-that-its-site-was-populated-with-fake-female-accounts/ http://techcrunch.com/2015/08/31/ashley-madison-refutes-clai... http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/statement-from-avid-life-media-monday-august-31-2015-300135089.html http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/statement-from-avid-... Care to apologise?
    - emodendroket 11y ago
      Wow, press releases from the company accused of fraudulently generating data in the first place -- how could I not be convinced by that evidence?
- mattmanser 11y ago
  http://techcrunch.com/2015/08/31/ashley-madison-refutes-claims-that-its-site-was-populated-with-fake-female-accounts/ http://techcrunch.com/2015/08/31/ashley-madison-refutes-clai... http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/statement-from-avid-life-media-monday-august-31-2015-300135089.html http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/statement-from-avid-... This refutation was widely reported, although unsurprisingly not as much as the original cockup.

downandout 11y ago

I personally know the founder of an SEO company that is running around 50 fake searches per second as I type this.

meeper16 11y ago
...and is likely pinging his 5000 or 500,000 fake social networking profiles every second.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
legutierr 11y ago
Very interesting. I assume that he is doing that in order to collect up-to-date search result data. Or is he actually attempting to manipulate search results (or AdWords ratings) in some way?
- halcyondaze 11y ago
  It's to manipulate the 'auto-complete' feature.
  - downandout 11y ago
    Bingo. That, and clicking on results that are further down actually does help propel them higher.
vorg 11y ago
Some outfits don't just do fake searches but also fake downloads. E.g. visit https://bintray.com/groovy/maven/groovy/view/statistics#statistics https://bintray.com/groovy/maven/groovy/view/statistics#stat... then click on date range "1 year" and wonder why the daily download numbers suddenly multiplied by 10 in late May. You'll have trouble believing the 2.5 million download number for Groovy from Bintray, and wonder how long they've been running the same ploy with Maven.

eecks 11y ago

Doesn't Google make money off fake clicks on ads?

meeper16 11y ago
Not allowing fake ads https://support.google.com/adwordspolicy/answer/6020954?hl=en https://support.google.com/adwordspolicy/answer/6020954?hl=e... is different than allowing fake profiles to boost your monthly active user counts if your a social network.
nosuchthing 11y ago
Yes, but they have fairly comprehensive effort to prevent automated ad clicks - http://adage.com/article/digital/inside-google-s-secret-war-ad-fraud/298652/ http://adage.com/article/digital/inside-google-s-secret-war-...
- geocar 11y ago
  That sort of thing has nothing to do with the type of fraud in the article. Boris Boris sells the contents of the iframe he bought on Doubleclick to Myspace (as "paid traffic"), which in-turn lets Myspace sell it on video exchanges. Google don't care even a little bit about this, since they still make a fortune off the Boris's of the world.

r00fus 11y ago

Apropos: Palantir crows about being able to use multiple sock puppet accounts to spam social networks - "persona management" [1]. It's a big market - and there are vendors who specialize in fake accounts - that means there's a lot of interest/money in being able to fake popularity. The future ground of all social networks is Astroturf. [1] http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/06/23/1218189/-HBGary-Palantir-Prism-Facebook-The-Industrial-Surveillance-Complex http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/06/23/1218189/-HBGary-Pal...

forgetsusername 11y ago

>This is the elephant in the room nobody wants to talk about in the social networking space. Indeed. I was working for a Facebook gaming company around 2010. Through the "recruit a friend" bonuses and "have X friends click this" mechanics, there were incentives to simply make fake accounts to obtain the goals. We looked at our users and figured about half were fake Facebook accounts. I have to imagine the numbers for other companies, like Zynga, were similar, as they used the same mechanics.

cwyers 11y ago
From an advertiser's point of view, those fake profiles are still real humans, right? So your ad is still being seen, and those Facebook profiles probably share enough of the social graph with a real Facebook profile that you can still do demographic targeting, no?
- TheCapn 11y ago
  Not necessarily. I'm not in the SEO or advertising game but intuition tells me that having the same person see an ad twice is less valuable than 2 people seeing the ad. Additionally, as a result "fake" accounts are likely to contain less information advertise to "target" so they're only hitting fake accounts with overly broad appeal and not really creating content that might interest the user on his/her fake profile.
- forgetsusername 11y ago
  >* those fake profiles are still real humans, right?* This is true. I'm more thinking along the lines of "we have 1 billion active users!" >you can still do demographic targeting, no? This I'm not so sure about. Some targeting, sure. But the fake profiles make it more difficult, since the demographic data is also fake.
  - meeper16 11y ago
    These are completely fake, synthetic profiles. This is why you can buy them here: https://www.google.com/search?q=buy+facebook+accounts&oq=buy+facebook+accounts&aqs=chrome.0.69i59.3415j0j1&sourceid=chrome&es_sm=93&ie=UTF-8 https://www.google.com/search?q=buy+facebook+accounts&oq=buy...

geocar 11y ago

Boris buys "links", not "likes". Some of the companies fulfilling Boris get those links by simply buying iframes on doubleclick, so Google makes money, Boris makes money, and the advertiser gets a comScore cookie to "prove" it's in-demo.

jgalt212 11y ago

yes, lots of scepticism here, but everyone (at least everyone who didn't get down-voted) seemed to buy into FB's claim of 1 billion users in a single day. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10131975 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10131975

meeper16 11y ago
Half are bots and there's no incentive for facebook to really find out which accounts are fake, astroturfed, bot-driven and which one's are not. Instagram, with some of its fake accounts, now with its claimed 400million accounts, overlap with facebooks.