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I Tried to Virtually Stalk Mark Zuckerberg
- sortof 11y agoI agree that it was difficult parsing data on a post about a specific topic, Christmas. However, most comments will be in reply to a post which usually has a central theme.
- akras14 11y agoTrue. Looking back though, it might have been more funto pick a more controversial subject.
- xiphias 11y agoIf Facebook is so important to you, why not just get the necessary skills for the interview and join the company?
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- eric001 11y agoI would probably go with auto-reply as soon as he post something, receive the text message and then edit the reply to something meaningful. Fun read! :)
- akras14 11y agoAh, great idea. I did not think of that :)
- feelix 11y agowell, are you going to try it?
- akras14 11y agoProbably not, I am pretty convinced at this point that Mark ignores those comments anyway.
- jaxomlotus 11y agoWell, I know this wasn't your intention, but you could always "sell" that top spot and edit in the content from a top marketer, keeping it subtle enough that it looks legit. Also, Mark is just one person. Imagine if you opened this script up for use targeting the fans of any celebrity / influencer. Companies would be willing to pay a LOT of money to be able to reach those audiences. Can't believe I'm advocating comment spam, but sometimes the opportunities jump out at me. :)
- akras14 11y agoIt's a valid point, but I personally wouldn't want to build a business build on spamming.
- davito 11y agoThe idea was just great akras14...sadly you're not interested in effecting that again. Would've loved the outcome.
- davito 11y agoeric001... Perfect, just perfect logic
- ace_33 11y agoWhat a fun project, thanks for the share!
- MIKarlsen 11y agoInspiring use of scraping through social media - just what I was looking for as my next project.
- petercooper 11y agoThere is an amazing amount of Interesting™ stuff you can do with social media. I've been actively looking for and following people in the "social media influencer" game to see just how they pull it off (things like getting apps to the top of the app store, building gigantic and legit Twitter and Instagram accounts, etc.) On this particular story, doesn't Facebook let you create notifications in any way? I get instant notifications from certain best friends for some reason. Maybe you could create a burner FB account and make Zuckerberg the only friend. I'd also consider trying this on someone like Robert Scoble or a tech journalist - someone who has a gigantic following, but relatively low comment velocity.
- akras14 11y agoGreat point. I was actually thinking to say something along those lines in the conclusion. While I would say my approach was mostly useless with a celebrity of Mark's scale. It could work with less popular accounts that do not get as much attention.
- Gustomaximus 11y agoThis article is interesting (there a discussion on HN somewhere): http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-how-to-hack-an-election/ http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-how-to-hack-an-electi... Anecdotally, through ~2009/11 you could use keyword density as a significant ranking variable on the Google Play store. I was amazed when I discovered as web SEO had long left this behind. I had an app coming up 3rd in searches for things like FB and YT.
- pierregillesl 11y agoAwesome work, love the concept :)
- haddr 11y agoCool experiment! BNtw. is there any similarity measure that can be calculated with less complexity? (e.g. without the need to compare every pair of comments?)
- zoidb 11y agoNice write up! I would assume in a large distributed back-end like facebook that notifications are not sent immediately and definitely not sent to everyone at the same time. This probably means that it is impossible to rely on them to get a first post comment.
- akras14 11y agoYes, I am sure you are right. It did seem like some people were able to compose well thought out responses in a very short time. Which most likely was due to them getting a head start thanks to an advanced notification.
- anfroid555 11y agoMark is not bill! Mark got everything from mommy and daddy! Bill started in his garage.
- DizzyEgg 11y agoBill's mum was on the board at IBM
- akras14 11y agoBill Gates was also from an affluent family, which among other things helped him to log a lot of hours on a computer at the time when it was not available to the masses. I think there is some luck at play for both of them. But I also think they deserve credit for their accomplishments.
- marincounty 11y agoI give both of them credit for their successful businesses. It's the same credit I give to Donald Trump. They are all fine businessmen. In my world, I want moral businessmen. They all made a lot of money. There's a part of me that cringes whenever Gate's talks about giving away his money. Yes, he made the money legally. We paid for his philanthropy? (To the Gate's, and his wife's non-profit; stop giving third world farmers Monsanto seeds. They are only getting one crop. Listen to Buffett's son.) As to Mark. Yes he's a fine businessman. I don't think he has had an original thought since he stole the idea from the twins. I've never worshiped, nor liked that guy. I take that back--loved the tee shirts, and jeans. Honestly--I've never understood the whole tie thing. And to be completely honest; I will love the internet again when/if FB is displaced by a the next big, new, wiz bang app. I am really tired of FB. Go ahead call me a Troll. Call me a Hater. I like a lot of Founders, and their companies. I have never liked these two.
- rboyd 11y agoWho are some of the lesser-known founders that you do like, out of curiosity?
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- bryanrasmussen 11y agocan you figure out a posting schedule for this Mark Zuckerberg guy, maybe there are certain times he is more likely to post. Then you can increase your rate of monitoring during those times, without such a high chance of being labelled a spammer by Facebook?
- akras14 11y agoThat's sounds like another interesting project to try :)
- davito 11y agoI should try this
- zappo2938 11y agoIt takes a while for a Facebook post to processed. When posted it shows up in the user's news stream. However, once the page is refreshed it might be a few minutes before the post is seen again. I watched a video where some developers were talking about the problems with getting feedback to the posting user and pushing the posts to different server farms around the world. A lot of posts take minutes to propagate.
- arviewer 11y agoThat would mean that you should use vpn and get an American IP address, close to a FB datacenter.
- zappo2938 11y agoTo hack Facebook maybe first we need to understand how they do things.[1] [1] https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/scaling-out/23844338919/ https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/scaling-...
- noobie 11y agoThis is great! You should also post it on /r/Dataisbeautiful to get more insight. Kudos.
- akras14 11y agoAlready did, thank you though :)
- amelius 11y ago> I Tried to Virtually Stalk Mark Zuckerberg Isn't this just called "following"?
- wodenokoto 11y agoAt first I also thought that stalking would be summarising several sources to find his physical location or something. So like you I was also initially a bit disappointed by the non-mallace in his approach. But given his goal of "becoming a friend" by automatic following Mark, I ended up concluding that stalking wasn't hyperbole.
- slmouradian 11y agoCould you reply to his post by SMS?
- akras14 11y agoI am sure I could, but I generally have a fast internet connection, so it wouldn't be any faster.
- magoon 11y agoThere is a point at which social becomes anti-social, even online.
- austinjp 11y agoLovely write-up, made me smile. I'll be reading your other posts on related subjects. Great to read a walk through of a "directed trial and error" approach. Out of curiosity, how did you select NLTK and a graphing approach? Did you consider other techniques for ploughing through the data?
- shermablanca 11y agoIf I had the resources zuckerberg has, and the access to information and data that he does, my posts would be optimized to show asynchronously by region, and to show first in the region most likely to respond positively to my post. That way it sets a tone of positivity for the rest of the commenters. At least in theory.
- redpanda_ua 11y agoYou, I like you. They do social experiments anyways, so you never know, maybe they do some targeted notifications based on some set of metadata.
- joshfraser 11y agoforget regions. they can show it to positively-disposed individuals.
- rudolf0 11y agoClever. I suspect that would eventually be noticed by a researcher, but it may take a while.
- akras14 11y agoThere might be even something to that. I.e. If I was Mark, I would not release in India first, with all the Anti "Free Basic" sentiment.
- ed_blackburn 11y agoAlex, where's my money $4.5m? :) Nice to read an article with a smile.
- akras14 11y agoHaha :)
- holografix 11y agoLove seeing someone using selenium and I had no idea you could use anything else than the Chrome driver, what's a headless browser?! I automated whole sections of my old Sales Rep job with Selenium it was so awesome
- voyweb 11y agoCare to share further what you automated?
- holografix 11y agoI was working a sales development type role, which involved some pretty fierce competition to "claim" inbound leads (contact form submissions basically) before anyone else did. Also there were a series of clicks and repetitive tasks you had to perform on each of these leads after you claimed it. So I automated getting a list of leads, opening them in multiple tabs and sequentially performing all the repetitive tasks so when I eye balled them, they were at the right point in the process. I reckon I save myself about 1.5 hours per day doing this.
- brbsix 11y agoBasically just a browser without a GUI. You can run a normal browser like Chrome or Firefox with a dummy display server or a real headless browser like PhantomJS or SlimerJS.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- coldcode 11y agoWhile the analysis was interesting, I can't help but wonder why so many people write pointless comments to what is probably some marketing person impersonating Mark.
- minimaxir 11y agoBecause said comments have a reach of millions, and said comment has a picture of yourself and a link to your personal profile. You can get a lot of subscribers that way.
- akras14 11y agoI think a lot of them share same hopes/sentiment that I did. A lot of them write as if they think there is high chance that Mark will read their comments. Even though I am pretty certain at this point that he won't.
- onewaystreet 11y agoZuckerberg has replied to random people before so he probably does read some of them.
- cname 11y agoHow do you know it wasn't the same marketing person mentioned in the GP writing those responses?
- arviewer 11y agoIt's a ego boost. Nothing more. You associate yourself with a famous person. It feels good. Even if it is totally pointless. Maybe a friend notices. And sometimes your comment gets many likes, but then you're really lucky.
- chris_wot 11y agoSo it's entirely pointless then. Good to know.
- ohitsdom 11y agoThis is why I love this industry. He started with a somewhat "bad" idea- even an automated reply would have a really hard chance being the first comment. But, he was able to experiment and tweak the idea to do something pretty cool with his work while learning. Well done!
- akras14 11y agoThank you :)
- dmn001 11y agoIt would just be much easier to use the Facebook graph api, there is an official Python module and is well documented, and would be less likely to hit rate limits or other blocks - ironically that was one of the reasons that the author used scraping instead of the api.
- minimaxir 11y agoIncidentally, the Graph API wouldn't work for this use case, since the Graph API will not let you get any data from users unless that user is authorized.
- coco1989 11y agoI just lost 6 inches of penis. I read the whole article down to the last sentence. When I got to his tag line I realized I had just ingested an overdose of SF tech nerd. This is supposed to be a funny comment but it is not
- akras14 11y agoHaha, you win. I am not 100% sure what you mean, but I am glad you liked it?
- SonicSoul 11y agodoes Mark respond to any of the posts? if so, what kind. Do some types of posts always generate more "buzz" among other commenters? Those are some of the questions that would be interesting to answer. In this case the process was far more interesting than the findings, thanks for citing the book and videos.
- akras14 11y agoI don't remember seeing any responses in my data set. I think I have seen him respond to comments before, hence where I got my inspiration. I also know that he has people who actually are connected to him (he friended them back) and their comments appear to show up differently from the regular followers. He does reply to those comments a lot more, intensifying the illusion that if you write to him, he will read it.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- blakesterz 11y agoI can't tell if saying 'Mark Zuckerberg – the Bill Gates of our time' was a joke or not. I mean, isn't Gates very much still going strong? I get the analogy I suppose, but doesn't that imply Gates is all washed up?
- pwython 11y agoWe're just getting old my friend. There are kids programming right now that were born after 9/11.
- peter303 11y agoBills big asset growth period was the mid 1980s to late 1990s when MSFT stock doubled every other year. Its only doubled once in the entire 21st century. Zucky is in his high personal asset growth stage now.
- dlsx 11y ago"The Bill Gates of our time" fuck you.
- mod 11y agoI'm really curious why browsers can't handle 18mb of comment data. I've observed the problem myself when trying to load up old fb conversations to search for some detail I knew was there. What's 18mb when my machine has 12gb ram?
- hughes 11y agoI doubt it's the data itself that your browser is struggling with. It's more likely the parsing of the comment content, generation of 20,000 templates, keeping track of probably a quarter million DOM nodes, listening to a hundred thousand events, and making sure all of that is layed out and aligned sensibly in real-time that your computer struggles with.
- mod 11y agoHere's hoping it's only one event as opposed to a hundred thousand, at the very least. In jQuery, for instance, you'd do something like $(parentOfComments).on('eventName', '.commentClass', function() { //dostuff }); The event propagates up to the body or whatever parent element you use.
- arm 11y agoGood point, although 18 MB of text is a lot of text. If I might digress a bit… most text editors will choke on an 18 MB text file as well (and if it’s an 18 MB text file with just one line (like a base64 string with no line breaks)… good luck getting anything other than a hex editor to open that with any speed). The only text editor I’ve found that doesn’t bog down too much when opening huge text files (even some of the ones with no line breaks!) is the one that comes with OS X: TextEdit¹. ―――――― ¹ — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TextEdit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TextEdit
- drunkcatsdgaf 11y agoI open pretty decent size sql files (200m-1g) all the time in vi without much issue.
- joshvm 11y agoI thought it seemed odd that Python supported the AND operator on lists, but it doesn't. You do need to convert to a set first, e.g. [1,2,3] & [1,2] gives a TypeError, while set([1,2,3]) & set([1,2]) gives set([1,2]) as expected.
- johansch 11y agoThis is all so sad. WTF! http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/i-hope-senpai-will-notice-me http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/i-hope-senpai-will-notice-me
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- zyxley 11y agoLooking at the graph of comment text, it's remarkable how many people are convinced that Mark Zuckerberg should be giving them money for some reason.
- Newky 11y agoEnjoyed the article. For once, this article showed some flaws in the original process/idea, and showed very nicely how an original seed idea turned into something different, and more involved/interesting. Clearly a lot of work and sweat went into getting the results you did, and the final output looks very polished. Congrats for having the courage to post this.