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> When you "share" a story, you're just helping a spammer spam. The spammers are getting really savvy about it too. I recently read an article in my feed that
by jobu 9y ago
> When you "share" a story, you're just helping a spammer spam.
The spammers are getting really savvy about it too. I recently read an article in my feed that was interesting and funny, so I shared it. The next day my wife asked me why I shared that garbage site, and when I looked at it on her phone the formatting was completely different. It was now a 10 page article with a mess of ads and a paragraph or two of text on each page.
They created some decent content with a catchy headline. Then they seeded it out on social media and waited until it had "gone viral" before they crammed it full of shitty ads.
- jxramos 9y agoWow, I've yet to experience this, I'll have to keep an eye out for this sort of deception and recognize what is happening when it's happening. Good heads up.
- wapz 9y agoYeah I've made it a habit to never share or click any facebook stories anymore (anything that links to another site). If something interests me, I open up firefox with noscript and search for the site on google to find it. Not sure it's any better but I don't want FB to start spamming me with even more 'related' articles/sites.
- itissid 9y agothat's so unsettlnng that its a big enough trend that companies/people can think of profiting this way. I always thought "majority" people would read whats under a link before sharing it and a few would just blindly share, but its the opposite!
- kbenson 9y agoIt's worse than just not reading it. The GP post is about reading it and finding it worthy, only to find that at some point after sharing it the original author edited it to add a lot of ads.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- eecc 9y agoLink cropping?
- Joof 9y agoSo you're saying we need immutable facebook links?
- danso 9y agoYou mean, immutable pages -- it seems the link was the same (unless the spammer did a 301), it's just that it was loaded with ads after it became popular. FWIW, this is a reason Facebook uses to advocate for its Instant Articles platform (and Google advocates for its AMP).
- dredmorbius 9y agoI'm finding tools such as the Internet Archive and archive.is (both of which preserve page formatting), or Instapaper, Pocket, or Outline.com (which don't) are useful in this regard. There's also "reader mode" browser features. Advertising must die.
- taneq 9y agoWhat are these "ads" things you speak of? I seem to remember the term from back before I installed uBlock Origin but it's been so long...
- dvtv75 9y agoYou've apparently been downvoted, but you raise a good point - although not the immediately obvious one: I've been seeing ads that get through uBlock Origin in the last few days. Just a couple, I haven't bothered investigating it.
- ge96 9y agoWhen you first share a page Facebook seems to cache it once, and after that you have to tack on the ?v1 or something to the end of the same url to make Facebook re-scrape it or whatever you call it (to get OG meta tags/image to fill post). Wonder if they could do something similar, cache the current contents of the page.
- 9y ago
- shostack 9y agoI'm curious--did you two view the site through different sources? I wonder if they were dynamically loading things based on where someone came from.
- Andrenid 9y agoI've noticed sites doing exactly this.
- corobo 9y agoImgur for example is quite happy to show you the image and that alone if you view it directly. (As in via i.imgur.com/*.png) Click the same direct image link from Facebook (Messenger in my example) and it'll redirect you to its full fat ad loaded page at best, at worst it'll just redirect you to its iOS/Android app listing with no way of actually seeing the damn image you clicked
- Silhouette 9y agoJust to be clear, you're saying someone was complaining about a site that suddenly got popular through network effects and then started showing adverts to make some money off it... on Facebook? Getting initial traction using free stuff and then introducing ads or other revenue streams later once you're big enough is pretty much the dominant business model online today, unless you are a vendor of real products or services for which you charge real money in return.
- Stanleyc23 9y agoI think your missing the time scale to which this is happening. what I understand is that it's an article that tries to have a good UX when the article has minimal traction let's say 15 visits per hour, but high share-ability and once the network effects takes over and you have 1500 visits per hour, you pump in the ads. this is fundamentally different from the usual ad-supported website because the quantity of ads is consistent across all users. it's a clever dark pattern IMO.
- Silhouette 9y agoI understand the difference in timescales; I just don't see that much difference in the principle. Either it's reasonable to attract people based on free stuff and then monetize or it's not. I would agree that what is happening here is a dark pattern, but it's a dark pattern that has been the foundation for much of what people enjoy for "free" on the modern Web as well, so it doesn't seem particularly surprising to me that someone would try the same idea in a much accelerated process.
- Stanleyc23 9y agook a more grounded expectation is that this basically is a bait and switch tactic, which I believe (not 100% sure) is illegal in the US. (edit below) it has to do with the amount of value inherent to the value proposition. you can try to exact more value from a product and potentially degrade the experience as a result. that's legal because it's a competitive business decision, but at some point you misrepresent the value of the product you are offering my changing the experience too much. its a hazy line to draw because I think in the OP, the user may not have minded a couple ads, but rather they were annoyed by the inundation of too many ads to the point where you can't experience the actual value proposition of the article. then it becomes "spam". it is not sufficient to deem this as just another business practice. there are obviously "working" business models such as Ponzi schemes that are highly illegal.
- ouid 9y agoThis explains a lot.
- imron 9y agoAre you sure it wasn't just that you use an ad-blocker and your wife doesn't? Every time I use a web browser without an ad blocker I'm surprised at how shitty the web experience is.
- JoshMnem 9y agoI wonder if it's a referrer check. `if referrer == 'facebook': display_ads()`. That way the original viewer doesn't see the ad-filled page, but anyone clicking on the Facebook link does.
- markdown 9y agoThe imgur method. Very annoying.
- Cthulhu_ 9y agoYup, by default when you share a link using the official buttons it'll add tracking codes and referer query parameters to the request, easy to just slap on ads and crap if the link contains that.
- Pxtl 9y agoI'm surprised FB hasn't handled this the same way Google penalizes you for hiding content from users that is present in for the bot. If somebody is giving your users a 2nd-class experience, and you control the pipes, shouldn't you punish them?
- manigandham 9y agoMany clickbait/content spam sites use referring sources to change the article content into galleries to maximize revenue, especially if they're also promoting these stories as ads on social media and recommended content widgets.