4 ms·

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.

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.