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Fake Friends with Real Benefits

310 points by ossama 12y ago

rzimmerman 12y ago
It's interesting how closely these things are intertwined (Twitter -> Klout -> Bing -> back to Twitter). Buying fake followers seems like a silly ego boost but apparently it does increase exposure.
eroo 12y ago
Seems intuitive, though interesting to see some actual data. I'd love to know how much the author's "real followers" increased after the artificial boost. This reminds my of Gary Becker's paper[1] which notes "demand by a typical consumer is positively related to quantities demanded by other consumers" as an explanation of why restaurants don't raise prices when demand is higher than supply (e.g, maintaining inertia for a 'hot' restaurant). In this context, it would appear the more popular someone appears, if only superficially, the more popular he is likely to become. [1] http://www.unc.edu/~fbaum/teaching/PLSC541_Fall06/Becker%20JPE%201991.pdf http://www.unc.edu/~fbaum/teaching/PLSC541_Fall06/Becker%20J...
gavanwoolery 12y ago
From a SEO standpoint, it makes sense (and the author's post is very insightful and well done)...but...I would have to ask what the end goal is? If you are an interesting person, people follow you because you are interesting. If not, you've got a bunch of fake followers and people who follow you because they think you are important or have a good retweet reach. You become like many mainstream celebrities - famous for no good reason. I've found Twitter to be a far more valuable experience when rather than try to accumulate followers, you follow people with similar interests and interact with them. I always follow people who follow me as a courtesy (unless they are a bot), even if it makes my followers/following ratio "look bad." The majority of the time, these followers are actually interesting to read because even if they don't make cool stuff, they retweet about people who do and I learn about many projects I would not have otherwise. When you interact with your followers, you multiply your reach by a whole new magnitude because they will often retweet to their followers (if maximizing reach is one of your goals). Also, as a side/bonus note, one "hidden" feature of Twitter is that it has built in analytics (I say "hidden" because its not immediately obvious where to find it): http://analytics.twitter.com/ http://analytics.twitter.com/
- reledi 12y ago
  The Get started button on http://analytics.twitter.com http://analytics.twitter.com is just a link to the same page. Is the service not available yet?
  - gavanwoolery 12y ago
    Hmm...I am not sure, are you currently logged in to Twitter? Not sure what it displays if you are logged out. When I go there it displays this: http://i.imgur.com/XyGYv6H.png http://i.imgur.com/XyGYv6H.png
    - reledi 12y ago
      No dice. Tried it on a different computer as well. Was signed in both times. Maybe they're slowly rolling it out so they close registration sometimes.
      - alxndr 12y ago
        "in order to get access, be sure to that tweets to your URLs with cards are showing up with cards. You will need to have at least 10 tweets within a week for the volume to be noticed and for the analytics dashboard to be turned on. Once the minimum number of tweets have been found, you should gain access within 24 hours. Let me know if you have any other questions!" https://dev.twitter.com/discussions/25376#comment-57856 https://dev.twitter.com/discussions/25376#comment-57856
ryandrake 12y ago
The crux of the article was presented near the top: "on social media it is easy to mistake popularity for credibility" I wouldn't say this is limited to social media. This flaw is present in search engines as well, which is why link farms work (and search engines are in a constant, futile battle against them). In politics, it's why astroturfing works and why the more you spend on saturation advertising, the better your chances are. It's really a flaw in human nature--to confuse popularity for credibility. I'm convinced that anything out there, online or off, with a ranking system that relies on popularity (counts of links, likes, eyeballs, votes, etc.) is ripe for disruption. What's the alternative way to separate genuine credibility from fake (purchased) credibility? Figure it out and you'll be a billionaire.
- gavanwoolery 12y ago
  Google is somewhat good a discerning credibility, IMHO. At least, whenever I search for something I tend to get exactly what I'm looking for without a bunch of spammy links. Of course, this could be because most of the stuff I search for is just on Stack Overflow or Wikipedia. :)
  - yen223 12y ago
    StackOverflow ranks answers based on how many upvotes it gets. In other words, it establishes a user's credibility based on his answers' popularity...
    - jjoonathan 12y ago
      Yeah, but popularity on StackOverflow is related to "does it work for me," a metric that ultimately depends on evaluation by an impartial machine (or a human using their knowledge of the impartial machine to perform the same evaluation). You can't get popular on SO by answering with random snippets from TAOCP. Or maybe you can and I'm missing a business opportunity. A TAOCP+OraclePropaganda bot sounds like something that might make bags and bags of money.
      - 12y ago
wirrbel 12y ago
The interesting thing is that the whole purpose of buying followers is then to push oneself up over the constant "noise" of the social-network plattform.
kordless 12y ago
tl;dr; guy increases an integer value in a field in a very large database by doing something the database owners doesn't want him to do.
- yen223 12y ago
  Most people have to work full-time jobs just to increase an integer value in a very large database.
0x0 12y ago
My 7 year old twitter account has reached the max of 2000 following, so I can no longer subscribe to more users. This has turned me off twitter since it's so annoying finding more interesting users but not being able to subscribe to them. Maybe I should pony up $5 and buy some followers, which apparently increases the limit on following too.
- ritchiea 12y ago
  I recommend using lists. I'm not sure if there's a limit on the number of people you can add to a list but I haven't hit one yet. I typically follow only friends and people who I find particularly interesting but I put lots of other people on lists. The other benefit of twitter lists is you can divide accounts by categories. For instance I have a list called hackers that is only programmers, and a list that is only designers, etc. I find lists can give useful context to twitter and help pull some signal out of the noise.
  - 0x0 12y ago
    That's interesting. Unfortunately the UI is all about "follow @user" buttons, lists not so much. I'm guessing browsing list feeds aren't as prominent in the mobile apps either, but I haven't tried yet. Anyway the user hostile error messages I got when I tried to add following user #2001 - instead of a suggestion like yours, perhaps - made me lose interest in the whole thing.
    - ritchiea 12y ago
      The UX makes it pretty easy to add users to lists. You click on the gear next to the follow button then click Add/Remove from lists. And I'm pretty sure it's present in the mobile app as well.
      - 0x0 12y ago
        Looks like it's there in the main mobile app. But what about embeddable widgets on websites? And now i need multiple taps to add a follower. And will it show "added to your list" status like it shows "following"? Too much effort. Plus, it seems twitter thinks I'm using their service in the wrong way. If the way I like to use it is wrong, I guess it's better to just stay away, makes everyone happier.
moonlighter 12y ago
This effect can be observed in the real world, too. For example, ever been to a new restaurant which is almost completely empty? I feel more inclined to go inside if it already has a good amount of patrons if I've never been there before. Or a waiting line outside a club or even an ice-cream truck. More people in line == the illusion of it appearing to be good/interesting/crowd-approved (to an outside observer).
xiaoma 12y ago
This won't work forever. As the practice gets more popular, Twitter will have increasingly compelling incentives to crack down on it so that its metrics retain value.
stcredzero 12y ago
Fake Friends with Real Benefits in the early 20th century: $20,000 for club membership. Early 21st century: $5 for 4000 fake followers.
_greim_ 12y ago
It's a prisoner's dilemma degenerating into a tragedy of the commons. If I refrain from artificially boosting my follower count, but you don't, I lose and you win, and vice versa. If we both refrain, we both benefit, albeit only from the real work we put into organically growing our followers. If neither of us refrain, the numbers become increasingly meaningless and we're left with no way to demonstrate our credibility.
- michaelochurch 12y ago
  It's a prisoner's dilemma degenerating into a tragedy of the commons. This is how I feel about LinkedIn. I've seen so many losers and fuckups (people I've worked with who have destroyed teams and companies) with large numbers of tit-for-tat, glowing recommendations and ridiculous endorsement counts. I haven't played that game (and have an extremely boring LI profile, with past employers not listed) and my numbers are embarrassing. It's more like the "tragedy of the uncommons": bland people fighting to establish themselves as somehow special or superior, and fucking up everything for everyone. It just generates noise, and the winners are the people who are best at making the right kind of noise. LinkedIn also tricked a generation into giving up one of their most important professional rights: the right to reinvent themselves. I use it, because the information is useful, but I feel like the world was a much better place when professional oversharing wasn't expected. When labor overshares and capital doesn't change what it does, who should one expect to win? As far as I'm concerned, I don't have an ethical problem with social proof arbitrage. Even if I did, that'd just mean losing to others who don't follow such rules. The main reason I don't do it is that I don't care. I'm apathetic about "social proof" in general because, in humans, sociality is inversely proportional to quality. I certainly wouldn't want to work at a job where the difference between a 2000 and a 6000 follower count mattered.
  - brianpgordon 12y ago
    > I've seen so many losers and fuckups (people I've worked with who have destroyed teams and companies) with large numbers of tit-for-tat, glowing recommendations and ridiculous endorsement counts I've seen this too, but it's not a new phenomenon. This has always happened behind closed doors; LinkedIn merely makes it public.
hyperion2010 12y ago
Conclusion: if I haven't seen the network graph I know absolutely nothing about what 'number of followers' actually means.
tlrobinson 12y ago
Clearly "follower count" is not a good metric, just like "inbound link count" from the early days of search engines was not a good metric. It's pretty damning these fake followers were able to game Klout's algorithms, since that's what Klout was trying to solve. But "number of followers" is easy for people to understand so people will continue to consider it important.
- shurcooL 12y ago
  Yeah, a follower count is a bad metric because it completely ignores the quality of a follower. Compare a high profile, well known, respected and talented person who has contributed a lot as a follower, as well as a bot who signed up a week ago and has no meaningful contributions. Each follower counts for 1 in the total follower count.
- marmarlade 12y ago
  >> It's pretty damning these fake followers were able to game Klout's algorithms, since that's what Klout was trying to solve. Agreed. They must have improved their algorithm since though, surely? The algorithm at PeerIndex (European Klout competitor) was good at ignoring fake followers IIRC. See https://web.archive.org/web/20130426180937/http://www.kernelmag.com/features/report/2709/peerindex-ceo-buying-twitter-followers/ https://web.archive.org/web/20130426180937/http://www.kernel... & http://blog.peerindex.com/pornfluence-and-the-world-of-buying-followers/ http://blog.peerindex.com/pornfluence-and-the-world-of-buyin... (quite a similar experiment that Gilad conducted)
lifeformed 12y ago
Medium's image blurring "feature" is kind of annoying sometimes. I'm trying to look at the picture, and I want to scroll to see the bottom of it, and then the picture just suddenly becomes obscured for no reason. I know it's to make the caption more readable, but I want to look at the caption and the picture at the same time. They should just put a caption in a darkened, translucent region.
- barsonme 12y ago
  If you or anyone else wants to view the image easier, here it is: https://d262ilb51hltx0.cloudfront.net/fit/t/1400/1120/gradv/29/81/55/1*wZ7XrANFmrdOrbzrXfkguw.png https://d262ilb51hltx0.cloudfront.net/fit/t/1400/1120/gradv/... or imgur mirror: http://i.imgur.com/wZvP14e.jpg http://i.imgur.com/wZvP14e.jpg
callmeed 12y ago
I'd like sources on SEO being a "muti billion dollar industry". Tens/hundreds of millions, maybe. I doubt multi-billions.
- jonknee 12y ago
  It most certainly is if you count the gains captured with SEO.
  - callmeed 12y ago
    That's like saying the CRM market includes all the gains captured from sales they helped close.
gedrap 12y ago
Some people say what's the point of that. Well, assuming the twitter user is brand/product/company, organic followers equal to potential users. And if the fake followers help to get the organic followers (oh this brand has 50k followers, must be something compared to oh just 200 followers, they probably suck), that's profit. I guess conversion rate from twitter follower to paying user is fairly low (just a guess), but still we are talking about $5-20 investment. After some time, you can just remove fake ones from the followers list using API, shouldn't be hard if you saved fake followers IDs somewhere after purchasing. Just like nothing happened :) Of course from moral point of view, that's wrong. I wouldn't do that. But plenty of people would.
e12e 12y ago
So the takeaway is that if one wants to stay competitive in the market for twitter follow bots, one should make sure to pay attention to the interconnectedness of ones bot "community". Start now, and avoid being purged as twitter gets smarter banning bots in the future! I wonder how increased activity (in order to appear more normal) among bots will affect twitters overall performance? Will we see something (more) like email, where spam uses disproportionally more resources than legitimate email?
hmmh 12y ago
Rob Walker wrote a piece for Yahoo Tech this past week about a band that bought Twitter followers + YouTube views for the launch of their debut single, which is largely about those very things. https://www.yahoo.com/tech/one-bands-quest-to-boost-its-openly-fake-fan-base-87816663874.html https://www.yahoo.com/tech/one-bands-quest-to-boost-its-open...
skizm 12y ago
> "on social media it is easy to mistake popularity for credibility" This happens in real life also. World leaders are chosen based on popularity and not credibility. That isn't to say all popular people are not credible or even most popular people are not credible. Just that there are a lot of important positions that are filled by popular or likable idiots.
- nileshtrivedi 12y ago
  "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow."
- mathattack 12y ago
  I've heard stories of politicians buying crowds to attend events. This just seems like a much more efficient means of doing the same thing.
ilamont 12y ago
Twitter must recognize patterns associated with bot accounts and purchased followers. Why aren't the bots shut down, or some other penalty imposed upon those accounts which exhibit certain behaviors described in the post?
- jfoster 12y ago
  It sounds like the bots pose more of a problem to Klout & Bing than they do to Twitter. Everyone's Twitter feed ("core functionality") still works very well even in the presence of this type of not, but the same cannot be said of the effect they might have on the core functionality of Klout and Bing.
- newaccountfool 12y ago
  Because that's not as simple as you make it out to be, the bot creators will just make the bots look more real, then you create an even bigger problem. Bots that function like real accounts. It wouldn't be hard to do at all it would just take some time.
Pxtl 12y ago
The only real takeaway from this article for me is that Klout really sucks... Not just that it sucks on its own, but its suck is screwing up Bing SRPs and therefore incentivizing spambots.
rspeer 12y ago
I rest assured that services like this will be worthless when Twitter figures out how to algorithmically distinguish real followers from fake ones. They do publish research in graph theory as applied to social networks, after all. They could even pull a Google and make it a net negative for your profile to have fake followers.
ttty 12y ago
From: http://www.quora.com/Psychology/What-is-the-coolest-psychology-trick http://www.quora.com/Psychology/What-is-the-coolest-psycholo... TLDR: because the majority does one thing, it can influence others; Text without login: This one is very interesting and you can try with your friends/family. There is a theory called Spiral of silence which observes the fact that " one opinion becomes dominant as those who perceive their opinion to be in the minority do not speak up because society threatens individuals with fear of isolation." When someone perceives his/her opinion as in the minority, he/she tends to omit or even change it. Humans fear social isolation and want to be part of strong groups, those which will win, the majority (even so, in researches there is always 5% of individuals who do not omit or change opinions: they tend to be the opinion leaders). In a macro level, it can influence voting results, laws to be adopted or who's the next president. You can feel the micro level of it by trying this: 01. Invite to go to the movies that friend who is really optimistic about some movie (he/she read good reviews, loved the trailler, liked the director/actors, etc.) 02. Invite other two or three friends and tell them to show disappointment about the movie after the exhibition (regardless of their true opinion about it). 03. After the exhibition, ask your optimistic friend about his/her opinion. He/she will probably say nice things 04. (You and your other friends) Say things like "I was expecting more", "I don't think it was that great", "It could be better", "The negative reviews were right" 05. Watch your friend's reaction 06. If he/she doesn't change his/her opinion right away, ask again for it the day after. He/she will probably start to feel uncomfortable with his/her own opinion and constrained. Maybe he/she will try to convince you (then keep strong, no need to argue back and try not to offend him/her), maybe he/she will just start to agree with you all. But it's very likely that your friend changes his/her opinion by the day after... ...especially if he/she doesn't read/talk about it with anyone else. This is important because the Spiral of Silence is all about perceptions, and not true reality. Your friend must think that the majority didn't like the movie. If he/she finds out you and your tricky friends are minority, he/she can go back to his/her original opinion. And that's the other interesting thing about this theory: sometimes what is perceived as majority is, actually, just a loud minority. Think about it.
squiggy22 12y ago
"A higher Klout score put me higher on Bing’s search results." Where is OP getting that from? Enhancing Bing's Knowledge graph result set. yes. Improving ranking. Not so much.
dorfsmay 12y ago
Interesting. I find bots start to follow me randomly, and about half of them stop following me after a few days. I suspect that the ones that stop following me are fishing for people to follow them in return. I had been wondering about the other ones, now I suspect they follow random people to look less like bot...
alxndr 12y ago
Medium makes it pretty hard to view a chart and its caption at the same time.

310 points by ossama 12y ago

It's interesting how closely these things are intertwined (Twitter -> Klout -> Bing -> back to Twitter). Buying fake followers seems like a silly ego boost but apparently it does increase exposure.

eroo 12y ago

Seems intuitive, though interesting to see some actual data. I'd love to know how much the author's "real followers" increased after the artificial boost. This reminds my of Gary Becker's paper[1] which notes "demand by a typical consumer is positively related to quantities demanded by other consumers" as an explanation of why restaurants don't raise prices when demand is higher than supply (e.g, maintaining inertia for a 'hot' restaurant). In this context, it would appear the more popular someone appears, if only superficially, the more popular he is likely to become. [1] http://www.unc.edu/~fbaum/teaching/PLSC541_Fall06/Becker%20JPE%201991.pdf http://www.unc.edu/~fbaum/teaching/PLSC541_Fall06/Becker%20J...

gavanwoolery 12y ago

From a SEO standpoint, it makes sense (and the author's post is very insightful and well done)...but...I would have to ask what the end goal is? If you are an interesting person, people follow you because you are interesting. If not, you've got a bunch of fake followers and people who follow you because they think you are important or have a good retweet reach. You become like many mainstream celebrities - famous for no good reason. I've found Twitter to be a far more valuable experience when rather than try to accumulate followers, you follow people with similar interests and interact with them. I always follow people who follow me as a courtesy (unless they are a bot), even if it makes my followers/following ratio "look bad." The majority of the time, these followers are actually interesting to read because even if they don't make cool stuff, they retweet about people who do and I learn about many projects I would not have otherwise. When you interact with your followers, you multiply your reach by a whole new magnitude because they will often retweet to their followers (if maximizing reach is one of your goals). Also, as a side/bonus note, one "hidden" feature of Twitter is that it has built in analytics (I say "hidden" because its not immediately obvious where to find it): http://analytics.twitter.com/ http://analytics.twitter.com/

reledi 12y ago
The Get started button on http://analytics.twitter.com http://analytics.twitter.com is just a link to the same page. Is the service not available yet?
- gavanwoolery 12y ago
  Hmm...I am not sure, are you currently logged in to Twitter? Not sure what it displays if you are logged out. When I go there it displays this: http://i.imgur.com/XyGYv6H.png http://i.imgur.com/XyGYv6H.png
  - reledi 12y ago
    No dice. Tried it on a different computer as well. Was signed in both times. Maybe they're slowly rolling it out so they close registration sometimes.
    - alxndr 12y ago
      "in order to get access, be sure to that tweets to your URLs with cards are showing up with cards. You will need to have at least 10 tweets within a week for the volume to be noticed and for the analytics dashboard to be turned on. Once the minimum number of tweets have been found, you should gain access within 24 hours. Let me know if you have any other questions!" https://dev.twitter.com/discussions/25376#comment-57856 https://dev.twitter.com/discussions/25376#comment-57856

ryandrake 12y ago

The crux of the article was presented near the top: "on social media it is easy to mistake popularity for credibility" I wouldn't say this is limited to social media. This flaw is present in search engines as well, which is why link farms work (and search engines are in a constant, futile battle against them). In politics, it's why astroturfing works and why the more you spend on saturation advertising, the better your chances are. It's really a flaw in human nature--to confuse popularity for credibility. I'm convinced that anything out there, online or off, with a ranking system that relies on popularity (counts of links, likes, eyeballs, votes, etc.) is ripe for disruption. What's the alternative way to separate genuine credibility from fake (purchased) credibility? Figure it out and you'll be a billionaire.

gavanwoolery 12y ago
Google is somewhat good a discerning credibility, IMHO. At least, whenever I search for something I tend to get exactly what I'm looking for without a bunch of spammy links. Of course, this could be because most of the stuff I search for is just on Stack Overflow or Wikipedia. :)
- yen223 12y ago
  StackOverflow ranks answers based on how many upvotes it gets. In other words, it establishes a user's credibility based on his answers' popularity...
  - jjoonathan 12y ago
    Yeah, but popularity on StackOverflow is related to "does it work for me," a metric that ultimately depends on evaluation by an impartial machine (or a human using their knowledge of the impartial machine to perform the same evaluation). You can't get popular on SO by answering with random snippets from TAOCP. Or maybe you can and I'm missing a business opportunity. A TAOCP+OraclePropaganda bot sounds like something that might make bags and bags of money.
    - 12y ago

wirrbel 12y ago

The interesting thing is that the whole purpose of buying followers is then to push oneself up over the constant "noise" of the social-network plattform.

kordless 12y ago

tl;dr; guy increases an integer value in a field in a very large database by doing something the database owners doesn't want him to do.

yen223 12y ago
Most people have to work full-time jobs just to increase an integer value in a very large database.

0x0 12y ago

My 7 year old twitter account has reached the max of 2000 following, so I can no longer subscribe to more users. This has turned me off twitter since it's so annoying finding more interesting users but not being able to subscribe to them. Maybe I should pony up $5 and buy some followers, which apparently increases the limit on following too.

ritchiea 12y ago
I recommend using lists. I'm not sure if there's a limit on the number of people you can add to a list but I haven't hit one yet. I typically follow only friends and people who I find particularly interesting but I put lots of other people on lists. The other benefit of twitter lists is you can divide accounts by categories. For instance I have a list called hackers that is only programmers, and a list that is only designers, etc. I find lists can give useful context to twitter and help pull some signal out of the noise.
- 0x0 12y ago
  That's interesting. Unfortunately the UI is all about "follow @user" buttons, lists not so much. I'm guessing browsing list feeds aren't as prominent in the mobile apps either, but I haven't tried yet. Anyway the user hostile error messages I got when I tried to add following user #2001 - instead of a suggestion like yours, perhaps - made me lose interest in the whole thing.
  - ritchiea 12y ago
    The UX makes it pretty easy to add users to lists. You click on the gear next to the follow button then click Add/Remove from lists. And I'm pretty sure it's present in the mobile app as well.
    - 0x0 12y ago
      Looks like it's there in the main mobile app. But what about embeddable widgets on websites? And now i need multiple taps to add a follower. And will it show "added to your list" status like it shows "following"? Too much effort. Plus, it seems twitter thinks I'm using their service in the wrong way. If the way I like to use it is wrong, I guess it's better to just stay away, makes everyone happier.

moonlighter 12y ago

This effect can be observed in the real world, too. For example, ever been to a new restaurant which is almost completely empty? I feel more inclined to go inside if it already has a good amount of patrons if I've never been there before. Or a waiting line outside a club or even an ice-cream truck. More people in line == the illusion of it appearing to be good/interesting/crowd-approved (to an outside observer).

xiaoma 12y ago

This won't work forever. As the practice gets more popular, Twitter will have increasingly compelling incentives to crack down on it so that its metrics retain value.

stcredzero 12y ago

Fake Friends with Real Benefits in the early 20th century: $20,000 for club membership. Early 21st century: $5 for 4000 fake followers.

_greim_ 12y ago

It's a prisoner's dilemma degenerating into a tragedy of the commons. If I refrain from artificially boosting my follower count, but you don't, I lose and you win, and vice versa. If we both refrain, we both benefit, albeit only from the real work we put into organically growing our followers. If neither of us refrain, the numbers become increasingly meaningless and we're left with no way to demonstrate our credibility.

michaelochurch 12y ago
It's a prisoner's dilemma degenerating into a tragedy of the commons. This is how I feel about LinkedIn. I've seen so many losers and fuckups (people I've worked with who have destroyed teams and companies) with large numbers of tit-for-tat, glowing recommendations and ridiculous endorsement counts. I haven't played that game (and have an extremely boring LI profile, with past employers not listed) and my numbers are embarrassing. It's more like the "tragedy of the uncommons": bland people fighting to establish themselves as somehow special or superior, and fucking up everything for everyone. It just generates noise, and the winners are the people who are best at making the right kind of noise. LinkedIn also tricked a generation into giving up one of their most important professional rights: the right to reinvent themselves. I use it, because the information is useful, but I feel like the world was a much better place when professional oversharing wasn't expected. When labor overshares and capital doesn't change what it does, who should one expect to win? As far as I'm concerned, I don't have an ethical problem with social proof arbitrage. Even if I did, that'd just mean losing to others who don't follow such rules. The main reason I don't do it is that I don't care. I'm apathetic about "social proof" in general because, in humans, sociality is inversely proportional to quality. I certainly wouldn't want to work at a job where the difference between a 2000 and a 6000 follower count mattered.
- brianpgordon 12y ago
  > I've seen so many losers and fuckups (people I've worked with who have destroyed teams and companies) with large numbers of tit-for-tat, glowing recommendations and ridiculous endorsement counts I've seen this too, but it's not a new phenomenon. This has always happened behind closed doors; LinkedIn merely makes it public.

hyperion2010 12y ago

Conclusion: if I haven't seen the network graph I know absolutely nothing about what 'number of followers' actually means.

tlrobinson 12y ago

Clearly "follower count" is not a good metric, just like "inbound link count" from the early days of search engines was not a good metric. It's pretty damning these fake followers were able to game Klout's algorithms, since that's what Klout was trying to solve. But "number of followers" is easy for people to understand so people will continue to consider it important.

shurcooL 12y ago
Yeah, a follower count is a bad metric because it completely ignores the quality of a follower. Compare a high profile, well known, respected and talented person who has contributed a lot as a follower, as well as a bot who signed up a week ago and has no meaningful contributions. Each follower counts for 1 in the total follower count.
marmarlade 12y ago
>> It's pretty damning these fake followers were able to game Klout's algorithms, since that's what Klout was trying to solve. Agreed. They must have improved their algorithm since though, surely? The algorithm at PeerIndex (European Klout competitor) was good at ignoring fake followers IIRC. See https://web.archive.org/web/20130426180937/http://www.kernelmag.com/features/report/2709/peerindex-ceo-buying-twitter-followers/ https://web.archive.org/web/20130426180937/http://www.kernel... & http://blog.peerindex.com/pornfluence-and-the-world-of-buying-followers/ http://blog.peerindex.com/pornfluence-and-the-world-of-buyin... (quite a similar experiment that Gilad conducted)

lifeformed 12y ago

Medium's image blurring "feature" is kind of annoying sometimes. I'm trying to look at the picture, and I want to scroll to see the bottom of it, and then the picture just suddenly becomes obscured for no reason. I know it's to make the caption more readable, but I want to look at the caption and the picture at the same time. They should just put a caption in a darkened, translucent region.

barsonme 12y ago
If you or anyone else wants to view the image easier, here it is: https://d262ilb51hltx0.cloudfront.net/fit/t/1400/1120/gradv/29/81/55/1*wZ7XrANFmrdOrbzrXfkguw.png https://d262ilb51hltx0.cloudfront.net/fit/t/1400/1120/gradv/... or imgur mirror: http://i.imgur.com/wZvP14e.jpg http://i.imgur.com/wZvP14e.jpg

callmeed 12y ago

I'd like sources on SEO being a "muti billion dollar industry". Tens/hundreds of millions, maybe. I doubt multi-billions.

jonknee 12y ago
It most certainly is if you count the gains captured with SEO.
- callmeed 12y ago
  That's like saying the CRM market includes all the gains captured from sales they helped close.

gedrap 12y ago

Some people say what's the point of that. Well, assuming the twitter user is brand/product/company, organic followers equal to potential users. And if the fake followers help to get the organic followers (oh this brand has 50k followers, must be something compared to oh just 200 followers, they probably suck), that's profit. I guess conversion rate from twitter follower to paying user is fairly low (just a guess), but still we are talking about $5-20 investment. After some time, you can just remove fake ones from the followers list using API, shouldn't be hard if you saved fake followers IDs somewhere after purchasing. Just like nothing happened :) Of course from moral point of view, that's wrong. I wouldn't do that. But plenty of people would.

e12e 12y ago

So the takeaway is that if one wants to stay competitive in the market for twitter follow bots, one should make sure to pay attention to the interconnectedness of ones bot "community". Start now, and avoid being purged as twitter gets smarter banning bots in the future! I wonder how increased activity (in order to appear more normal) among bots will affect twitters overall performance? Will we see something (more) like email, where spam uses disproportionally more resources than legitimate email?

hmmh 12y ago

Rob Walker wrote a piece for Yahoo Tech this past week about a band that bought Twitter followers + YouTube views for the launch of their debut single, which is largely about those very things. https://www.yahoo.com/tech/one-bands-quest-to-boost-its-openly-fake-fan-base-87816663874.html https://www.yahoo.com/tech/one-bands-quest-to-boost-its-open...

skizm 12y ago

> "on social media it is easy to mistake popularity for credibility" This happens in real life also. World leaders are chosen based on popularity and not credibility. That isn't to say all popular people are not credible or even most popular people are not credible. Just that there are a lot of important positions that are filled by popular or likable idiots.

nileshtrivedi 12y ago
"Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow."
mathattack 12y ago
I've heard stories of politicians buying crowds to attend events. This just seems like a much more efficient means of doing the same thing.

ilamont 12y ago

Twitter must recognize patterns associated with bot accounts and purchased followers. Why aren't the bots shut down, or some other penalty imposed upon those accounts which exhibit certain behaviors described in the post?

jfoster 12y ago
It sounds like the bots pose more of a problem to Klout & Bing than they do to Twitter. Everyone's Twitter feed ("core functionality") still works very well even in the presence of this type of not, but the same cannot be said of the effect they might have on the core functionality of Klout and Bing.
newaccountfool 12y ago
Because that's not as simple as you make it out to be, the bot creators will just make the bots look more real, then you create an even bigger problem. Bots that function like real accounts. It wouldn't be hard to do at all it would just take some time.

Pxtl 12y ago

The only real takeaway from this article for me is that Klout really sucks... Not just that it sucks on its own, but its suck is screwing up Bing SRPs and therefore incentivizing spambots.

rspeer 12y ago

I rest assured that services like this will be worthless when Twitter figures out how to algorithmically distinguish real followers from fake ones. They do publish research in graph theory as applied to social networks, after all. They could even pull a Google and make it a net negative for your profile to have fake followers.

ttty 12y ago

From: http://www.quora.com/Psychology/What-is-the-coolest-psychology-trick http://www.quora.com/Psychology/What-is-the-coolest-psycholo... TLDR: because the majority does one thing, it can influence others; Text without login: This one is very interesting and you can try with your friends/family. There is a theory called Spiral of silence which observes the fact that " one opinion becomes dominant as those who perceive their opinion to be in the minority do not speak up because society threatens individuals with fear of isolation." When someone perceives his/her opinion as in the minority, he/she tends to omit or even change it. Humans fear social isolation and want to be part of strong groups, those which will win, the majority (even so, in researches there is always 5% of individuals who do not omit or change opinions: they tend to be the opinion leaders). In a macro level, it can influence voting results, laws to be adopted or who's the next president. You can feel the micro level of it by trying this: 01. Invite to go to the movies that friend who is really optimistic about some movie (he/she read good reviews, loved the trailler, liked the director/actors, etc.) 02. Invite other two or three friends and tell them to show disappointment about the movie after the exhibition (regardless of their true opinion about it). 03. After the exhibition, ask your optimistic friend about his/her opinion. He/she will probably say nice things 04. (You and your other friends) Say things like "I was expecting more", "I don't think it was that great", "It could be better", "The negative reviews were right" 05. Watch your friend's reaction 06. If he/she doesn't change his/her opinion right away, ask again for it the day after. He/she will probably start to feel uncomfortable with his/her own opinion and constrained. Maybe he/she will try to convince you (then keep strong, no need to argue back and try not to offend him/her), maybe he/she will just start to agree with you all. But it's very likely that your friend changes his/her opinion by the day after... ...especially if he/she doesn't read/talk about it with anyone else. This is important because the Spiral of Silence is all about perceptions, and not true reality. Your friend must think that the majority didn't like the movie. If he/she finds out you and your tricky friends are minority, he/she can go back to his/her original opinion. And that's the other interesting thing about this theory: sometimes what is perceived as majority is, actually, just a loud minority. Think about it.

squiggy22 12y ago

"A higher Klout score put me higher on Bing’s search results." Where is OP getting that from? Enhancing Bing's Knowledge graph result set. yes. Improving ranking. Not so much.

dorfsmay 12y ago

Interesting. I find bots start to follow me randomly, and about half of them stop following me after a few days. I suspect that the ones that stop following me are fishing for people to follow them in return. I had been wondering about the other ones, now I suspect they follow random people to look less like bot...

alxndr 12y ago

Medium makes it pretty hard to view a chart and its caption at the same time.