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I'm perplexed here how there doesn't seem to be talk of the fact Facebook had 5.6 million bots disappear in one purge. In almost every Twitter thread on here t
by rubyn00bie 10y ago
I'm perplexed here how there doesn't seem to be talk of the fact Facebook had 5.6 million bots disappear in one purge.
In almost every Twitter thread on here there is plenty of disparaging talk about bots and how it makes the social network's MAUs distorted or make it less valuable. Yet, here is quite obviously an indication that Facebook suffers from the same-- if not worse problem because it's a walled garden and less easily viewed.
If anything I'd suspect that an inordinate amount of users on Facebook and its MAUs are bots because of this... that the problem may in fact be more prolific than twitters but goes unnoticed because we can't browse Facebook like we can twitter. It would certainly be a more valuable target as a result since people falsely believe in Facebook's metrics-- versus, say Twitter, where advertisers can see the bots.
... I'm just befuddled right now that the conversation is about how the bots liked a USA Today page and not the bots themselves. Maybe I missed the previous discussion. If I was USA Today, I'd certainly consider dumping any effort for Facebook as the numbers and metrics cannot at all be trusted to be real.
- pducks32 10y agoI fully agree. It's different on Twitter because it is far more public. Plus things like Retweets cause the problem. With Facebook it isn't much a problem except for more public entities like USA Today. On Twitter however I don't understand why they don't take more action. I know one account that is single handedly responsible for 99.999% of the spam I see. And it shouldn't be that hard to find and detect.
- dave5104 10y agoFacebook reported 1.23 billion daily active users as of last December [0]. 5.6 million bots is only 0.46% of the "user" base, so in terms of raw number of users it doesn't really seem all that bad. I would be curious, however, how much engagement that 0.46% accounted for. Didn't seem like much since the article mentions USA Today not seeing much of a dip in engagements. [0] https://newsroom.fb.com/company-info/ https://newsroom.fb.com/company-info/
- SomeStupidPoint 10y agoThis was only one purge tipped off by USA Today. I would guess that Facebook has 10-20x that number of bots total, since this appeared to be a single network that hadn't become "active" (as per the story). A quick Google puts Twitter at 9-15% bots, which makes the estimates roughly line up with what I'd expect: Twitter is slightly worse (2-3x bot concentration) but the two aren't incomparably different.
- iblaine 10y agoWhen I did analytics at MySpace, we had a concept called "one hit wonders" for new users that hit one page view per month. That was the typical behavior of a bot for MySpace at the time. Internally, the "one hit wonders" filter would be used by analysts. Externally, the filter would not be used because there was a desire to inflate stats. As a side note, the system to create these stats was pretty cool for its time. It was a 52 node asterdata cluster on bare metal (MySpace had deep pockets at the time). It could analyze every session ever created on MySpace in the span of a few hours.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]