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The Facebook Text Prompt Zombie Land
- pimlottc 5y agoI love that the author complains about another popular Facebook page that’s using engagement bait to push a dropshopping affiliate program, while their own blog post has a sponsored ad for NFT perfume.
- brendoelfrendo 5y agoYeah, what's even the point of the NFT at that point? It's like saying "if you buy a Cracker Jack card, we'll give you a box of Cracker Jacks!" Who's going to buy an NFT that gives comes with a physical product on the secondary market? Unless that business will only sell to NFT holders in perpetuity, which sounds like a poor way to grow a business but hey, lots of things are successful by being exclusive.
- xmprt 5y agoAt this point, the only reason I can think of is VC funding. But I also don't know why VCs don't see through this bullshit... They're supposed to be smart right? Even if they're shotgun investing and hoping that one company goes 100x, I can say with absolute certainty that this company is either going to fold or get rid of the NFT aspect of the business in the next 5 years. What's the point of investing in a company like that?
- VHRanger 5y agoVCs dont care that a product is bullshit as long as they can sell it for more to someone else
- lupire 5y agoYou don't need VC to sell a NFT digital picture. There is no cost.
- jondwillis 5y agoLast time I checked, producing the very non-non-fungible ketchup perfume has a cost.
- bduerst 5y agoVCs are also like lemmings in that they need to have startups with trending tech in their portfolio, even if it's overhyped garbage. If a few jump then the others get FOMO.
- lupire 5y agoIt's just bonus incentive for the first owner. It's clearly not worse than the NFT without the add-on. > Unless that business will only sell to NFT holders in perpetuity That's what BAYC does. Then you open a next tier NFT line to expand down-market.
- lupire 5y agoThe ad and the liked opensea blurb openly call itself a troll... it's not trying to pretend to be anything serious.
- DevKoala 5y agoBut it is still advertising something. I don’t see the difference. Self mockery is a common advertiser tactic.
- jonathankoren 5y agoIsn't that NFT perfume sarcasm?
- azinman2 5y agoWonder if there’s any value in a 3rd party curation of Facebook to just give me meaningful updates from friends… aka the original usage. No links, no politics, just family pics, announcements, etc. I’d love to get a weekly digest to my email!
- gfody 5y agoI'd be interested in that, ideally not a third party but a custom client that filters everything not from friends and sticks to chronological order.
- Tenoke 5y agoHave you tried the popular extensions like FB Purity[0]? As far as I know there's plenty of options that do what you want unless they've been broken by Facebook recently? I haven't tried them in a long time since I do want to see posts by pages and groups I'm in (why else would I follow them), and don't see any of the stuff people typically complain about anyway. 0. https://www.fbpurity.com/ https://www.fbpurity.com/
- gfody 5y agoI really only use the native ios app and figured anything that did what I want would be taken down for violating some tos
- dylan604 5y agoI don't trust extension devs to not be doing only what they claim with the data. Too many stories of things going wrong in the that ecosphere that I threw the baby out with the bath water.
- BbzzbB 5y agoThat exists, it's www.facebook.com/?sk=h_chr No more "X friend liked Y photo or commented on Z post", no more recommended content, not even sponsored posts I think (quite the loophole, if you work at Facebook please move along). Just what your follows (friends and pages) posted, chronologically. Nothing from groups tho if that's your thing.
- mrguyorama 5y agoCalling what Rick Lax does "magic" is pretty damn generous. He makes fake videos that are hyper produced. Think 5-minute crafts and friends. Also pretty fitting to have this article sponsored by an NFT "product" that claims to be a "troll on the perfume industry". What even?
- cblconfederate 5y agoIt's hilarious to me that the author pretends we should have higher standards of facebook. Hey do you know how much facebook paid for the content they publish? You know what you get for $0 ? Nothing or less than nothing. And it s not just facebook, all of them are selling attention, not content. As long as users are not compensated for their content, the audience will be fed with trash
- vanilla_nut 5y agoI mean, plenty of people write blogs for no compensation whatsoever (usually paying some token fees for hosting and domains, making it a net expense). Just because content is free doesn't mean it has to be bad.
- xmprt 5y agoExactly. I've seen plenty of YouTube videos that are excellent despite being made by tiny channels of just a few 100 or 1000 subscribers. Same goes for a lot of the posts on Hackernews. And TikTok has a massive userbase that's still growing because even if it's not healthy for you, at least the content on the platform is good. Facebook is both unhealthy and bad content. Every time I scroll through, it feels like I'm torturing myself a little.
- cblconfederate 5y agoIt's their blogs, they don't do unpaid work for facebook
- bduerst 5y agoI think their point was that facebook doesn't care if it's good or bad so long as it's free to them and engaging. You can have an ocean of free blogposts but if it's not engaging then it's not easy to monetize.
- rightbyte 5y ago> As long as users are not compensated for their content, the audience will be fed with trash Not really. On the opposite. If there is no money to be made there is no ad harvesting bullshit to be made.
- barbazoo 5y agoExcuse my ignorance but how do they make money with this? Ads associated with their posts?
- brendoelfrendo 5y agoVideo ads is one, branded sponsorships is another (not sure if this page engages in that). Looks like Facebook also offers subscriptions and a "tip jar"-type feature: https://www.facebook.com/business/learn/lessons/how-make-money-facebook https://www.facebook.com/business/learn/lessons/how-make-mon...
- mysterydip 5y agoThat's what I've been trying to figure out. So you have a million comments and a hundred thousand shares, is that just internet points? There has to be some financial compensation I'm not seeing.
- kristopolous 5y agoThere's an internal user reputation score that measures the engagement of your posts. You can piggyback the business on the noise. Advertisers are using this trick too. Healthcare ads with a gay couple, grocery ads with a Muslim, they aren't doing it because they're being inclusive, but because people click and interact with those types of ads. Recently it's become pretty blatant. The people/signal could be removed and the ad is still a complete message. The character is adjacent to the content. It's there as "interact-bait" to get people to furiously type at the keyboard and thus boost the advertiser's engagement score.
- BbzzbB 5y agoHow much does it matter here tho? I think it gatters likes/follows and baits enough people to check the profile, but the conversion rate seems extremely low (tho I guess that may be good enough with these numbers). In OP's blog previous post [0] on "Thinkarette Lifestyle" [1], their engagement baits gather hundreds to thousands (to millions with homeruns) of comments while the dropshipping posts gather 0 to 5 likes a piece - a page with >2M likes. 0: https://www.garbageday.email/p/when-the-traffic-firehose-is-pointed https://www.garbageday.email/p/when-the-traffic-firehose-is-... 1: https://www.facebook.com/Thinkarete/ https://www.facebook.com/Thinkarete/
- brendoelfrendo 5y agoThey mention investigating another viral post farm back in November, which was discussed on HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29309201 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29309201 Link to the November post: https://www.garbageday.email/p/when-the-traffic-firehose-is-pointed https://www.garbageday.email/p/when-the-traffic-firehose-is-... All roads to monetization require engagement, so you just end up with groups that churn out "bait" like this.
- bredren 5y ago> There should be no illusions anymore about what Facebook is, as a platform. It’s just random bits of sensory information meant to make old people fight with each other Oof. Engagement around conflict works at all age ranges though. Controversial statements by eSports casters drives posts on Reddit, NIMBY comments on NextDoor, etc. I suspect the tone of this comment is to suggest the platform's algorithms did a better job mixing in rich content and focusing attention on more interesting, less conflict-laden viral media?
- verall 5y ago> Engagement around conflict works at all age ranges though. It certainly does, but content like that is described in the article, is clearly aimed a less internet-savvy crowd. Maybe the same crowd that didn't grow up with internet trolls and have copious free time and are at the highest risk for contracting plague, so they are especially juicy targets for online engagement vampires.
- allenu 5y ago> Engagement around conflict works at all age ranges though. I've noticed that the best way to get people to engage in a problem is to state an opinion that is so obviously wrong. People go out of their way to tell you that it's wrong and what their opinion is. If you post something that's sort of wrong, partially right, or probably right, people won't lift a finger. Try this with your next code review! :D Do something the wrong way and everyone wants to correct you. I've noticed after I've corrected such a problem, people are silent about the rest of the code review, or get lazy about finishing it.
- dylan604 5y agoWe would use a version of this concept in client reviews, and construction inspections are known to do the same. WHen you know there are things that you would rather not have the client notice, put something so obvious that is easily corrected. The client sees that, feels great that they actually had something to say/do/etc, and then the rest slips through.
- brink 5y agoI don't think it's fair calling it "boomer bait". I see people from every generation commenting on them.
- chizhik-pyzhik 5y agoReminds me of the article about "internet chum" on The Awl: https://www.theawl.com/2015/06/a-complete-taxonomy-of-internet-chum/ https://www.theawl.com/2015/06/a-complete-taxonomy-of-intern...
- bduerst 5y agoThe slightly gross, slightly enraging content they're talking about also made me think of internet chum buckets too.
- narrator 5y agoThe ads for games in my feeds are like this guy's viral text. They show someone failing at a very simple puzzle game and say, "millions have tried, few have succeeded!" this is just bait for customers to play the very easy game and prove to themselves that their brains aren't slowly rotting away. In a similar vein, coming up with a word with an 'ee' in it, as in the linked article, is trivial and makes people feel smart.
- Ozzie_osman 5y agoEven worse than those posts are Facebook's new Reels (i guess their tiktok competitor). Insanely click-bait, usually some suspenseful caption and/or a cover picture that's somewhat sexually suggestive. I keep trying to hide them from my feed but Facebook just keeps bringing them back.
- alar44 5y agoOut of curiosity I've watched some of these. 50% of them, I can't even figure out what they're supposed to be. The other day I saw one where a girl was taking a selfie near the water. A guy picking up trash walked near her, she pushed him (I don't know why), she then dropped her phone in the water, jumped on a fence, jumped back on the shore and mean mugged him. I was honestly baffled as to what happened Part of me thinks that these videos are being generated by AI and aren't real at all. A good chunk of them make absolutely no sense to me.
- ipaddr 5y agoWas a better logo ever made? Love the garbage can. Is there a technique for creating such beautiful artwork? It looks like it belongs in a video game.
- cglong 5y agoActual title is "Viral content optimized to piss off old people", which seems less clickbaity than the subtitle that was chosen for this post.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- jakub_g 5y agoThese are the worst, but there is another annoying type as well, on FB and LinkedIn based on emoji reactions: "Which is the best city??? (like) for London, (love) for Paris, (think) for Berlin" This type of stuff gets millions of likes in no time either.
- alkonaut 5y agoWhat’s the point of “engagement” for the person posting a troll post getting lots of comments/shares/likes/whatever? Does FB have any way for those who created the content to be compensated for it in any way?
- MasterScrat 5y agoIt causes future posts from these pages to rank higher, so when they push some dropshipping scams they'll get more eyeballs without having to pay for them. It's similar to a lot of "cute cats/dogs" accounts on Instagram. They get tons of views without gaining much from it. But then they can sell "sponsored" posts and stories that reach tons of people, which they charge hundreds for (commonly also used for dropshipping ads).
- cybarDOTlive 5y agoI was always fascinated by this stuff too, it's pretty blatant once you recognize it. And then you lose hope in humanity seeing all the people replying.
- Ishmaeli 5y agoI would suddenly feel a lot better about things if this explained the resurgence of stuff like Flat Earth theory. Sadly, I don't think that's the case.
- rossdavidh 5y agoSomewhat related to the "dead internet theory", but in this case one side of the relationship is just not quite dead yet.
- BbzzbB 5y agoUnless the video [0] I had seen (some time ago) on the subject didn't explain it right, it seems to be conflating "group think" and pattern recognition with "everyone on reddit is a bot except you"[1]/"the Internet is a Markov chain". I've had too many exchanges with obvious humans on Reddit to believe a super-majority of it is bot-generated. Than there are the plethora of terrible chat bots that kind of prove the point the Internet can't all be botted without being obviously so. And than they (he?) layer(s) in the conspiracies like "Facebook is a DARPA-sponsored project" because of funny timing [2]. And than there's my own observations when looking at people "in the wild" and how many are glued to their phones; the Internet is a potent addiction and there's no need for a fringe theory to explain it. I can absolutely believe that a lot of comments on these baits are bots trying to look real for like/engagement-farms - could even explain why they catch like wildfire - as they are the perfect target with one-worded comments copied from others looking normal. But seems to me that theory [3] is a stretch, although it sounds like a compelling dystopia. 0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DEn758DVF9I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DEn758DVF9I 1: https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/348vlx/what_bot_accounts_on_reddit_should_people_know/ https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/348vlx/what_bot_... 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_LifeLog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_LifeLog 3: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2021/08/dead-internet-theory-wrong-but-feels-true/619937/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2021/08/dead-... >Dead-internet theory suggests that the internet has been almost entirely taken over by artificial intelligence.
- rossdavidh 5y agoPossibly related hypothesis: a minority of the human-generated content on the internet is "genuine", that is said because it is believed. Rather, a majority of the content that pretends to be genuine, is instead done only in order to try to provoke a response. In other words, most of the human-generated content on the internet is done by a human trying to emulate a bot, or at least with the same motivations as a bot.
- nomorecommas 5y agoUntil proven otherwise, assume every socmed account is a bot.
- ChrisClark 5y agoYou're a bot, I'm a bot, we're all bots. Are any humans left alive on Earth, or are they all still stuck in the 2020s simulation?
- danlugo92 5y agobeep bop beep bop
- kevinventullo 5y agoReminds me of “There Will Come Soft Rains”