12 ms·

This may rub some folks raw and be pessimistic, but a half a century on this planet has taught me that any solution which relies on "doing the right thing" (eth

This may rub some folks raw and be pessimistic, but a half a century on this planet has taught me that any solution which relies on "doing the right thing" (ethics) but does not have any rules, laws or other repercussion for abusing it, then (some entity - person or company) will use your altruistic belief to their own gain, ethics be damned. Just Google "buy reddit upvotes" and the internet is full of folks who will sell you a million Likes for cheap - in my mind, it's just a modern digital con (confidence game) - some of y'all may remember having created self-signed OpenSSL certs with the Snake Oil, Ltd company named in it. :) Even Wikipedia has a page for "there's a sucker born every minute" it's so institutionalized.

ATsch 7y ago
I think the more important point here isn't about ethics and punishment, but incentives. The larger a system is and the stronger it incentivises something, the more effort you're going to have to put into enforcing the status. This is why, in general, ideas that involve lots of actors changing their behavior contrary to incentives, instead of changing the incentives, are fundamentally flawed.
- rpastuszak 7y ago
  +1 Also, I feel like every system can be abused if the incentivised metric is defined poorly. Example: almost every advertising KPI. 1. A Brand wants to sell a product (incentive: sales). 2. Agency sales people want to reach a particular KPI—budget in this case, the higher, the better. 3. An Ad Tech company will serve ads based on a KPI agreed with the Agency (e.g. CPM, impressions). It's very easy to satisfy 2 and 3 without bringing any additional value to 1., for example by applying less strict viewability metrics (is 50% in view "visible" or 1%? should we pause the video ad below the fold? what is an impression, exactly?). The original intent (sell more units of product x) is gone. This is due to systematic issues with the industry, not a single specific company. But mainly, this is due to the fact that the established incentives represent only a chunk of the reality and can be followed without focusing on the actual problem. The overlap between actors' goals is poorly defined, small and often doesn't exist. In a nutshell: if we define a metric serving as a shortcut for our goal, people will find a way of improving the metric, but rarely reaching the goal. A broadly defined incentive is better than punishment.
  - maccard 7y ago
    That has a name, the Cobra Effect [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect
    - jefftk 7y ago
      The Cobra Effect is when you're trying to make there be fewer of things (cobras) but the incentives you set up actually lead to there being more of them (it's now worth it for people to be cobra breeders). Perhaps you're thinking of Goodheart's law? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
  - scarejunba 7y ago
    That's why attribution is such a big story in advertising. With semi-persistent identifiers, you can learn the story of whether someone was: 1) Visited your store before they saw your ad 2) Only visited your store after seeing your ad You can do this online or for physical store locations. There are lots of players there because big marketing teams are fairly sophisticated now: they want cross-channel identity (across mobile, web, TV), attribution, and measurement.
  - ec109685 7y ago
    A short term metric is necessary to allow campaigns to optimize their spend without a long multi-month turn around as conversions are fully tracked and users act upon the ad. While there is risk that the wrong short term metric is chosen (that is not indicative of the real goal the advertiser is trying to achieve), it is not an invalid approach. It is untrue that setting a short term goal will _rarely_ achieve the long term value. Otherwise, the advertiser will throw out that short-term goal since it is flawed.
- danans 7y ago
  > This is why, in general, ideas that involve lots of actors changing their behavior contrary to incentives, instead of changing the incentives, are fundamentally flawed. Indeed, this is what drives the Tragedy of the Commons - everyone acting according to their individual incentives, maximizing their individual benefit, but while exploiting an unregulated limited common resource, and externalizing the cost of doing so upon the commons. There are two solutions paths which are not mutually exclusive: put a higher price on the resource use or externality, and find a more efficient way to achieve meet needs. In many cases, the current incentives and resulting approaches keep us stuck in local maxima. An example is commuting in single occupancy personal vehicles in urban areas in the US. When you consider the layout of our cities and the limited mass transit availability, it very often makes more individual sense to drive when you consider factors like transporting children to school/activities, grocery shopping, appointments, etc. Sometimes the costs are actually to the individual rather than the commons, or are delayed in impact to the commons. In the previous example hours spent sitting in a vehicle instead of walking deprives individuals of opportunities to burn calories to control their weight, resulting in a variety of health issues. The problem is that there are a powerful set of interests who are interested in maintaining the current approaches and incentives at all cost. Again, in the transportation example above, these would include the fossil fuel extraction and highway expansion industries.
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    > There are two solutions paths which are not mutually exclusive: put a higher price on the resource use or externality, and find a more efficient way to achieve meet needs. I think the second one isn't really a solution. If you find a more efficient way to achieve the needs, the needs will expand to compensate. Even if everyone executes restraint, an entrepreneur will show up and start selling the remaining resources to people who don't have access to those resources. As far as I know, the only way to solve tragedies of the commons is for everyone to agree on a set of rules, and punishments that disincentivise breaking these rules. Which, in real life, is achievable only through centralizing the power that sets the rules and executes punishment - ongoing coordination is an unstable state.
    - 7y ago
- SkyBelow 7y ago
  I sometimes like to think of ethics as an incentive system that is (generally) stronger than social norms but weaker than laws. Once you reduce it to incentives, it is a matter of comparing incentives. If the incentive to behave ethically is much lower than the incentive to not, then people will pick the better option. That some people seem to be more ethical than others can be viewed as the extent they estimate the incentives from different behaviors (importance placed in the thoughts of others, if they believe some greater power judges them for their actions, etc.).
buboard 7y ago
There are trustless systems though, like bitcoin Oh btw you can buy hn upvotes too : https://upvotes.club/buy/hacker-news-upvote/ https://upvotes.club/buy/hacker-news-upvote/
- tyingq 7y ago
  "We upvote with very strong accounts; if you don’t make it on the main page after 10 upvotes, more won’t help"
  - throwno 7y ago
    Oh god. Imagine the thousands of bland consensus talking points they had to regurgitate to build those accounts. Never trust somebody with no gray comments.
    - tyingq 7y ago
      Don't help them :) They can just throw in a few posts disparaging Rust to look credible.
    - thenewnewguy 7y ago
      I guess that means I can trust you.
    - drummer 7y ago
      They also need a few warnings from dang for absolute trust.
  - iudqnolq 7y ago
    > On Hacker News, when the post is new, it doesn’t matter how much you upvote it after a certain point. After fewer than 10 early upvotes with great accounts, you’ll usually make it to the front page. From there, HN moderators select manually what they want to keep there. A good strategy is to buy only a few upvotes first in order to make your post visible; then, after it remains approved for 10 minutes or more, buy a lot more upvotes in order to rank it better, or help maintain its good position. Is this actually true? I don't think so. It also seems funny they offer to sell a factor of ten more upvotes to articles already on the front page. Maybe they'll just sit back and watch it happen regardless?
dsfyu404ed 7y ago
People do the right thing if it's worth their while. You don't need people to fear the state showing up and inflicting physical violence or rotting in hell for eternity in order to get people to act "right". You just need "right" to be more worth their while than "wrong". Now, fear of the state and/or fear of god are often used by society to weight people's choices but there's no reason thing have to be all stick and no carrot.
- apacheCamel 7y ago
  I know I think differently than most, but this idea always confused me. Yeah, if I threw a piece of trash out of my car window, I could possibly get in trouble but where I live, nobody will notice and I will probably get away with it. Instead, I could just do the right thing and not do that. Personally, I don't need that scary presence of responsibility to choose the "better" path. I guess it is really hard for me to see it from the other side's shoes.
  - cgriswald 7y ago
    My girlfriend and I recently found a lost dog. A package of salami, a phone call, and about 15 minutes later, the dog was reunited with its owner. We helped the dog despite a variety of risks to ourselves, despite not knowing when it would end, and despite being in a hurry. We didn't do it with any expectation of reward or kudos. And although we do train and board dogs as a side gig, we're already booked enough to be choosy about clients, so we weren't doing it for potential business. We did it because ignoring the dog felt bad and helping the dog felt good. That is, it was completely selfish on our part, but we still did the right thing. But at least a dozen other people just walked by the dog as if they didn't see it. It was off leash, unkempt, and clearly scared. They saw it, but they just walked on past. Why? Because, for whatever reason, they didn't feel badly enough or wouldn't feel good enough if they helped. I don't litter, either. And I take some personal responsibility for the litter of others. Again, because it feels good (or, in this case, living in a marginally cleaner city feels good). It also feels good knowing I might not be the only one who does so. Neither of these makes me a good person. There's one instance where I know I don't do the right thing: I don't visit people in hospitals unless someone else drags me along. The experience, for reasons I'd probably need a psychologist to figure out, is painful for me, and whatever reward I get visiting the person is dwarfed by that pain. Even the shame and embarrassment of being a person who doesn't visit people when they're in the hospital isn't enough of an incentive to go. I need an external incentive. I need a friend to say, "Hey, let's go visit Phil in the hospital" or I'll be 'too busy' to go. We all 'think differently' than each other. We're all doing what feels best. We all have different internal incentives and disincentives. So, for any sufficiently large group and any desired behavior, external incentives are required to get some of the people to exhibit that desired behavior.
patcheudor 7y ago
>any solution which relies on "doing the right thing" (ethics) but does not have any rules, laws or other repercussion for abusing it... Doing the right thing can vary by culture, perspective, and situation. What is right or wrong to us may be entirely different to someone who's family is starving as just one example. Given the world-wide nature of the Internet, as a species, it is unlikely we are going to be able to agree on a single set of rules or punishments within our life-time.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
colmvp 7y ago
> This may rub some folks raw and be pessimistic, but a half a century on this planet has taught me that any solution which relies on "doing the right thing" (ethics) but does not have any rules, laws or other repercussion for abusing it, then (some entity - person or company) will use your altruistic belief to their own gain, ethics be damned. 100%. I live in a big city and while there are bylaws, without enforcement people will break them all the time. An example of this is people bringing their dogs where they are not allowed to (e.g. school yards) or have them off-leash when they're not supposed to (e.g. on-leash parks). But because there are so few bylaw officers, few dog owners follow those rules.
- FatalLogic 7y ago
  I think you are ignoring all the thousands of laws, bylaws, norms, and codes of conduct that most people do follow most of the time. Without these, society would collapse within hours. You only notice the few laws that are sometimes broken.
unlinked_dll 7y ago
>Just Google "buy reddit upvotes" and the internet is full of folks who will sell you a million Likes for cheap Some years ago I made a post on /r/learnprogramming that TL;DR was along the lines of "go to college, great ROI, plus for your first job most employers auto reject resumes without a degree" or something along those lines. I was offered $500 up front and $500 referral bonuses to edit my comment to link to a fake degree mill. IIRC they charged something like $1500 for a fake degree and one year of service for employer education checks/transcripts. (by the by, if you're going to run a fake degree mill out of a residential address in San Mateo, use a VPN!) Point being, Reddit comments are ripe for abuse.
- Nas808 7y ago
  I used to mod an active subreddit and I saw this type of thing all the time. Once a post hits the front page or a comment gets gilded, the majority will just assume it's factual and will run with it. If anything it was kind of scary to see how easy people can be manipulated.
AndrewKemendo 7y ago
"Rules are only as good as their enforcement"
mkhpalm 7y ago
Does anybody besides me wonder why they never seem to do anything about it? Its really not that hard of a problem to solve.
- taylorhughes 7y ago
  Thousands of engineers at Facebook (and Google, and probably Twitter, and ...) work on stopping this kind of abuse. There are many very hard problems in this area; it is not remotely easy to "solve" a constantly evolving adversarial landscape.
  - mkhpalm 7y ago
    Do you have any concrete evidence of major attempts to stop it that failed? I'd like to see what they tried and what failed.
    - aguyfromnb 7y ago
      >I'd like to see what they tried and what failed. Being as how fake likes are possibly fraudulent and detrimental to the paying customers, I feel like these companies should be the ones openly demonstrating their attempts at stopping them. Otherwise, I'll default to "they allow it".
  - hinkley 7y ago
    The problem is incentives. There is, in all likelihood, a way to build an upvote system that is resistant to factory automation. The problem is that such a system doesn't have the exact feature set of the current system. Which means you have to give someone (probably several someones) bad news whether they want to hear it or not. This is not a strong suit for software devs in general, and in the case where the 'right thing' involves financial concerns, we almost always lose. Even when we are right. So rather than losing millions on taking away some feature that someone got promoted for, we lose millions by investing multiple man-decades into palliative care.
  - dbuder 7y ago
    Their system is so bad, I mean the fake accounts are mostly from only a few countries, we set our campaigns to local only and yet the likes come flooding in immediately from the subcontinent. FB keep hoovering up all this data but I am yet to see them use any of it for the benefit of society. Whenever FB/Goog/Amzn say anything, all that comes to my mind is LIAR.
frereubu 7y ago
I'm of a similar age, and generally agree with you, but for the sake of countering complete pessimism I also think it's worth adding some context in that it depends on numbers of people and the medium. The village that my mother lives in, population roughly 1000, has a broad cross-section of ages and political views, but everyone genuinely looks out for each other and does the right thing in the vast majority of circumstances. However, I live in a block of flats with around 150 people, and the residents association had to take down the forum on the website because people were making all sorts of wild accusations. (The WhatsApp group with families is pretty self-policing). The Internet is a problematic mix of vast numbers of people and very little personal accountability.
hinkley 7y ago
If you built an upvote system that works more like the old Netflix system worked in theory, then the only outcome of my upvoting something is that I see more things like it. There are quite a few problems with that, but the obvious ones I think are obvious to different people. One, movies are a fairly concrete topic. There are tons of laws about Copyright, so every movie has some bits of information you and I could exchange to know that we are talking about the same thing. And for purposes of marketing and awards ceremonies they are even grouped and tagged in some fairly official ways. Comments are amorphous. How do I tell if your comment and mine are 'alike'? Two, Netflix only sort of works because liking things is not free. If I were promoting a horror movie, I could create a bunch of accounts that like all of the classics of the horror genre, then add a few random movies, and my movie. Everyone who loves classic horror movies would correlate with my account, and that will mean my likes affect their suggestions. But... This is going to cost me. I have to create an account to vote. I have to (probably, I haven't checked in a while) attach a credit card to that account, so I could do that once, twice, a dozen times (everyone on my PR team) but beyond that things get complicated. There are limits to how much I could amortize those costs across multiple PR campaigns, but it might still be lucrative to do so. With Twitter or Facebook or a million other sites, there is no friction. I could create bots to do this for me, for the cost of some network-connected CPU time (Amazon spot instances). I could speculatively create bots so that I have a stable of 'clean' accounts for future activities that haven't even occurred to me or my customers yet. These activities are effectively parasitic, in the biological sense of the word (though some would agree in the rhetorical sense as well, but let's not get into that). Only when the host begins to die is there any selective pressure against them. Maybe we're seeing that now. The 'parasite' load is getting so high that the health of the host is in jeopardy. In nature this is one of the major selective pressures on parasites and some pathogens. Kill the host and you lose your meal ticket & transportation.

ATsch 7y ago

I think the more important point here isn't about ethics and punishment, but incentives. The larger a system is and the stronger it incentivises something, the more effort you're going to have to put into enforcing the status. This is why, in general, ideas that involve lots of actors changing their behavior contrary to incentives, instead of changing the incentives, are fundamentally flawed.

rpastuszak 7y ago
+1 Also, I feel like every system can be abused if the incentivised metric is defined poorly. Example: almost every advertising KPI. 1. A Brand wants to sell a product (incentive: sales). 2. Agency sales people want to reach a particular KPI—budget in this case, the higher, the better. 3. An Ad Tech company will serve ads based on a KPI agreed with the Agency (e.g. CPM, impressions). It's very easy to satisfy 2 and 3 without bringing any additional value to 1., for example by applying less strict viewability metrics (is 50% in view "visible" or 1%? should we pause the video ad below the fold? what is an impression, exactly?). The original intent (sell more units of product x) is gone. This is due to systematic issues with the industry, not a single specific company. But mainly, this is due to the fact that the established incentives represent only a chunk of the reality and can be followed without focusing on the actual problem. The overlap between actors' goals is poorly defined, small and often doesn't exist. In a nutshell: if we define a metric serving as a shortcut for our goal, people will find a way of improving the metric, but rarely reaching the goal. A broadly defined incentive is better than punishment.
- maccard 7y ago
  That has a name, the Cobra Effect [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect
  - jefftk 7y ago
    The Cobra Effect is when you're trying to make there be fewer of things (cobras) but the incentives you set up actually lead to there being more of them (it's now worth it for people to be cobra breeders). Perhaps you're thinking of Goodheart's law? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
- scarejunba 7y ago
  That's why attribution is such a big story in advertising. With semi-persistent identifiers, you can learn the story of whether someone was: 1) Visited your store before they saw your ad 2) Only visited your store after seeing your ad You can do this online or for physical store locations. There are lots of players there because big marketing teams are fairly sophisticated now: they want cross-channel identity (across mobile, web, TV), attribution, and measurement.
- ec109685 7y ago
  A short term metric is necessary to allow campaigns to optimize their spend without a long multi-month turn around as conversions are fully tracked and users act upon the ad. While there is risk that the wrong short term metric is chosen (that is not indicative of the real goal the advertiser is trying to achieve), it is not an invalid approach. It is untrue that setting a short term goal will _rarely_ achieve the long term value. Otherwise, the advertiser will throw out that short-term goal since it is flawed.
danans 7y ago
> This is why, in general, ideas that involve lots of actors changing their behavior contrary to incentives, instead of changing the incentives, are fundamentally flawed. Indeed, this is what drives the Tragedy of the Commons - everyone acting according to their individual incentives, maximizing their individual benefit, but while exploiting an unregulated limited common resource, and externalizing the cost of doing so upon the commons. There are two solutions paths which are not mutually exclusive: put a higher price on the resource use or externality, and find a more efficient way to achieve meet needs. In many cases, the current incentives and resulting approaches keep us stuck in local maxima. An example is commuting in single occupancy personal vehicles in urban areas in the US. When you consider the layout of our cities and the limited mass transit availability, it very often makes more individual sense to drive when you consider factors like transporting children to school/activities, grocery shopping, appointments, etc. Sometimes the costs are actually to the individual rather than the commons, or are delayed in impact to the commons. In the previous example hours spent sitting in a vehicle instead of walking deprives individuals of opportunities to burn calories to control their weight, resulting in a variety of health issues. The problem is that there are a powerful set of interests who are interested in maintaining the current approaches and incentives at all cost. Again, in the transportation example above, these would include the fossil fuel extraction and highway expansion industries.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  > There are two solutions paths which are not mutually exclusive: put a higher price on the resource use or externality, and find a more efficient way to achieve meet needs. I think the second one isn't really a solution. If you find a more efficient way to achieve the needs, the needs will expand to compensate. Even if everyone executes restraint, an entrepreneur will show up and start selling the remaining resources to people who don't have access to those resources. As far as I know, the only way to solve tragedies of the commons is for everyone to agree on a set of rules, and punishments that disincentivise breaking these rules. Which, in real life, is achievable only through centralizing the power that sets the rules and executes punishment - ongoing coordination is an unstable state.
  - 7y ago
SkyBelow 7y ago
I sometimes like to think of ethics as an incentive system that is (generally) stronger than social norms but weaker than laws. Once you reduce it to incentives, it is a matter of comparing incentives. If the incentive to behave ethically is much lower than the incentive to not, then people will pick the better option. That some people seem to be more ethical than others can be viewed as the extent they estimate the incentives from different behaviors (importance placed in the thoughts of others, if they believe some greater power judges them for their actions, etc.).

buboard 7y ago

There are trustless systems though, like bitcoin Oh btw you can buy hn upvotes too : https://upvotes.club/buy/hacker-news-upvote/ https://upvotes.club/buy/hacker-news-upvote/

tyingq 7y ago
"We upvote with very strong accounts; if you don’t make it on the main page after 10 upvotes, more won’t help"
- throwno 7y ago
  Oh god. Imagine the thousands of bland consensus talking points they had to regurgitate to build those accounts. Never trust somebody with no gray comments.
  - tyingq 7y ago
    Don't help them :) They can just throw in a few posts disparaging Rust to look credible.
  - thenewnewguy 7y ago
    I guess that means I can trust you.
  - drummer 7y ago
    They also need a few warnings from dang for absolute trust.
- iudqnolq 7y ago
  > On Hacker News, when the post is new, it doesn’t matter how much you upvote it after a certain point. After fewer than 10 early upvotes with great accounts, you’ll usually make it to the front page. From there, HN moderators select manually what they want to keep there. A good strategy is to buy only a few upvotes first in order to make your post visible; then, after it remains approved for 10 minutes or more, buy a lot more upvotes in order to rank it better, or help maintain its good position. Is this actually true? I don't think so. It also seems funny they offer to sell a factor of ten more upvotes to articles already on the front page. Maybe they'll just sit back and watch it happen regardless?

dsfyu404ed 7y ago

People do the right thing if it's worth their while. You don't need people to fear the state showing up and inflicting physical violence or rotting in hell for eternity in order to get people to act "right". You just need "right" to be more worth their while than "wrong". Now, fear of the state and/or fear of god are often used by society to weight people's choices but there's no reason thing have to be all stick and no carrot.

apacheCamel 7y ago
I know I think differently than most, but this idea always confused me. Yeah, if I threw a piece of trash out of my car window, I could possibly get in trouble but where I live, nobody will notice and I will probably get away with it. Instead, I could just do the right thing and not do that. Personally, I don't need that scary presence of responsibility to choose the "better" path. I guess it is really hard for me to see it from the other side's shoes.
- cgriswald 7y ago
  My girlfriend and I recently found a lost dog. A package of salami, a phone call, and about 15 minutes later, the dog was reunited with its owner. We helped the dog despite a variety of risks to ourselves, despite not knowing when it would end, and despite being in a hurry. We didn't do it with any expectation of reward or kudos. And although we do train and board dogs as a side gig, we're already booked enough to be choosy about clients, so we weren't doing it for potential business. We did it because ignoring the dog felt bad and helping the dog felt good. That is, it was completely selfish on our part, but we still did the right thing. But at least a dozen other people just walked by the dog as if they didn't see it. It was off leash, unkempt, and clearly scared. They saw it, but they just walked on past. Why? Because, for whatever reason, they didn't feel badly enough or wouldn't feel good enough if they helped. I don't litter, either. And I take some personal responsibility for the litter of others. Again, because it feels good (or, in this case, living in a marginally cleaner city feels good). It also feels good knowing I might not be the only one who does so. Neither of these makes me a good person. There's one instance where I know I don't do the right thing: I don't visit people in hospitals unless someone else drags me along. The experience, for reasons I'd probably need a psychologist to figure out, is painful for me, and whatever reward I get visiting the person is dwarfed by that pain. Even the shame and embarrassment of being a person who doesn't visit people when they're in the hospital isn't enough of an incentive to go. I need an external incentive. I need a friend to say, "Hey, let's go visit Phil in the hospital" or I'll be 'too busy' to go. We all 'think differently' than each other. We're all doing what feels best. We all have different internal incentives and disincentives. So, for any sufficiently large group and any desired behavior, external incentives are required to get some of the people to exhibit that desired behavior.

patcheudor 7y ago

>any solution which relies on "doing the right thing" (ethics) but does not have any rules, laws or other repercussion for abusing it... Doing the right thing can vary by culture, perspective, and situation. What is right or wrong to us may be entirely different to someone who's family is starving as just one example. Given the world-wide nature of the Internet, as a species, it is unlikely we are going to be able to agree on a single set of rules or punishments within our life-time.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

colmvp 7y ago

> This may rub some folks raw and be pessimistic, but a half a century on this planet has taught me that any solution which relies on "doing the right thing" (ethics) but does not have any rules, laws or other repercussion for abusing it, then (some entity - person or company) will use your altruistic belief to their own gain, ethics be damned. 100%. I live in a big city and while there are bylaws, without enforcement people will break them all the time. An example of this is people bringing their dogs where they are not allowed to (e.g. school yards) or have them off-leash when they're not supposed to (e.g. on-leash parks). But because there are so few bylaw officers, few dog owners follow those rules.

FatalLogic 7y ago
I think you are ignoring all the thousands of laws, bylaws, norms, and codes of conduct that most people do follow most of the time. Without these, society would collapse within hours. You only notice the few laws that are sometimes broken.

unlinked_dll 7y ago

>Just Google "buy reddit upvotes" and the internet is full of folks who will sell you a million Likes for cheap Some years ago I made a post on /r/learnprogramming that TL;DR was along the lines of "go to college, great ROI, plus for your first job most employers auto reject resumes without a degree" or something along those lines. I was offered $500 up front and $500 referral bonuses to edit my comment to link to a fake degree mill. IIRC they charged something like $1500 for a fake degree and one year of service for employer education checks/transcripts. (by the by, if you're going to run a fake degree mill out of a residential address in San Mateo, use a VPN!) Point being, Reddit comments are ripe for abuse.

Nas808 7y ago
I used to mod an active subreddit and I saw this type of thing all the time. Once a post hits the front page or a comment gets gilded, the majority will just assume it's factual and will run with it. If anything it was kind of scary to see how easy people can be manipulated.

AndrewKemendo 7y ago

"Rules are only as good as their enforcement"

mkhpalm 7y ago

Does anybody besides me wonder why they never seem to do anything about it? Its really not that hard of a problem to solve.

taylorhughes 7y ago
Thousands of engineers at Facebook (and Google, and probably Twitter, and ...) work on stopping this kind of abuse. There are many very hard problems in this area; it is not remotely easy to "solve" a constantly evolving adversarial landscape.
- mkhpalm 7y ago
  Do you have any concrete evidence of major attempts to stop it that failed? I'd like to see what they tried and what failed.
  - aguyfromnb 7y ago
    >I'd like to see what they tried and what failed. Being as how fake likes are possibly fraudulent and detrimental to the paying customers, I feel like these companies should be the ones openly demonstrating their attempts at stopping them. Otherwise, I'll default to "they allow it".
- hinkley 7y ago
  The problem is incentives. There is, in all likelihood, a way to build an upvote system that is resistant to factory automation. The problem is that such a system doesn't have the exact feature set of the current system. Which means you have to give someone (probably several someones) bad news whether they want to hear it or not. This is not a strong suit for software devs in general, and in the case where the 'right thing' involves financial concerns, we almost always lose. Even when we are right. So rather than losing millions on taking away some feature that someone got promoted for, we lose millions by investing multiple man-decades into palliative care.
- dbuder 7y ago
  Their system is so bad, I mean the fake accounts are mostly from only a few countries, we set our campaigns to local only and yet the likes come flooding in immediately from the subcontinent. FB keep hoovering up all this data but I am yet to see them use any of it for the benefit of society. Whenever FB/Goog/Amzn say anything, all that comes to my mind is LIAR.

frereubu 7y ago

I'm of a similar age, and generally agree with you, but for the sake of countering complete pessimism I also think it's worth adding some context in that it depends on numbers of people and the medium. The village that my mother lives in, population roughly 1000, has a broad cross-section of ages and political views, but everyone genuinely looks out for each other and does the right thing in the vast majority of circumstances. However, I live in a block of flats with around 150 people, and the residents association had to take down the forum on the website because people were making all sorts of wild accusations. (The WhatsApp group with families is pretty self-policing). The Internet is a problematic mix of vast numbers of people and very little personal accountability.

hinkley 7y ago

If you built an upvote system that works more like the old Netflix system worked in theory, then the only outcome of my upvoting something is that I see more things like it. There are quite a few problems with that, but the obvious ones I think are obvious to different people. One, movies are a fairly concrete topic. There are tons of laws about Copyright, so every movie has some bits of information you and I could exchange to know that we are talking about the same thing. And for purposes of marketing and awards ceremonies they are even grouped and tagged in some fairly official ways. Comments are amorphous. How do I tell if your comment and mine are 'alike'? Two, Netflix only sort of works because liking things is not free. If I were promoting a horror movie, I could create a bunch of accounts that like all of the classics of the horror genre, then add a few random movies, and my movie. Everyone who loves classic horror movies would correlate with my account, and that will mean my likes affect their suggestions. But... This is going to cost me. I have to create an account to vote. I have to (probably, I haven't checked in a while) attach a credit card to that account, so I could do that once, twice, a dozen times (everyone on my PR team) but beyond that things get complicated. There are limits to how much I could amortize those costs across multiple PR campaigns, but it might still be lucrative to do so. With Twitter or Facebook or a million other sites, there is no friction. I could create bots to do this for me, for the cost of some network-connected CPU time (Amazon spot instances). I could speculatively create bots so that I have a stable of 'clean' accounts for future activities that haven't even occurred to me or my customers yet. These activities are effectively parasitic, in the biological sense of the word (though some would agree in the rhetorical sense as well, but let's not get into that). Only when the host begins to die is there any selective pressure against them. Maybe we're seeing that now. The 'parasite' load is getting so high that the health of the host is in jeopardy. In nature this is one of the major selective pressures on parasites and some pathogens. Kill the host and you lose your meal ticket & transportation.