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A source for this picture?
- bilalel 12y agoAs replied the OP, it's an anonymous friend of him.
- albedoa 12y agoHe says in his very next tweet that he doesn't know if it's real: https://twitter.com/simonpang/status/562201979603021824 https://twitter.com/simonpang/status/562201979603021824 There’s lot of pay-to-review service on the net but most ppl never seen how they work. Dunno if it’s real but still give us some insight.
- msoad 12y agoHow she operates that many phones?
- valevk 12y agoI assume every phone is a different user, and she just goes around rating apps. I am not sure if you could automate that process, but then why would the phones be arrenged in such a way that one person can quickly click on every one of them, instead of a dark room.
- markkanof 12y agoProbably could automate it, maybe even by using a Mac and multiple instances of the iOS simulator, but that would require a lot of expensive development, so it's likelt much cheaper to buy a bunch of devices and hire super cheap labor.
- ascorbic 12y agoNo App Store on the simulator.
- nextstepguy 12y agoI don't believe you can rate an app on the app store from the emulator itself. You need a device.
- valevk 12y agoOr it's something else. Maybe a dating app?!
- pavel_lishin 12y agoYou could build a hardware rig that's programmed to hit the 5-star rating area, and then "submit" - but you'd also need to find a way to launch the app store to the correct app every time, and then debug the thing, and then still pay someone to stand around and watch in case it gets into trouble anyway.
- lsaferite 12y agoOpen CV could easily help in that area. Servo controlled stylus for input, OpenCV based watchdog against pre-programmed motions. Maybe mechanical turk or something to generate the reviews. Perhaps you could fight it by doing statistical analysis on review patterns. If the device is only ever giving great and/or crappy ratings and the same group of devices rates the same group of apps the same way, you could detect this. Edit: Of course, they could fight detection by having a queue of apps to review and an array of devices. Randomize the matrix and periodically retire a device to prevent it from gaining too much history. Since it's running in a machine it would likely be in pristine condition and capable of being resold as new. Heck, they could buy one, use it for a period of time then return it.
- sp332 12y agoJust yell HEY SIRI :)
- sosuke 12y agoI'm impressed the first reply came from someone from WSJ looking to make an article I presume.
- runjake 12y agoJust to head off a lot of confusion stirring on the net about this: The person who posted the picture is claiming this woman is doing app ratings, not some outsourced App Store submitted app approval process.
- waterlooalex 12y agoAh interesting, as in: she's the person who rates your app if you "buy" some ratings?
- giarc 12y agoYes. It's funny because everyone knows this has been going on forever, but I guess once they put a picture to it, everyone gets up in arms.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- m3rc 12y agoAnd I bet if you wanted she could rate your competitor's apps as well
- _rpd 12y agoI'm pretty sure a friend's app got a bad rating when he declined to sign up for a service like this.
- bduerst 12y agoHow did that go down? You would think it would be easier to just not talk to someone who solicits this.
- _rpd 12y agoMy understanding is that he got dozens of offers to help promote his app. Some were blatant buy-a-download - just to gain app store rank - some were less blatant, others were more traditional buy-a-targeted-clickthrough. It can be difficult to tell at first glance.
- CGamesPlay 12y agoSeems like this could be about app store ratings, but it seems more likely that this is about manual testing. Wake me up when there's some more (credible) information.
- pavel_lishin 12y agoThat seems like an awful lot of iPads for one person if she's just doing manual testing.
- 0xCMP 12y agoWell, they might be testing many apps at once. A lot of bugs are the "well it was running a long time and it crashed" type that you'd outsource.
- freditup 12y agoAll the devices look the same which would be strange for manual testing. However, agreed that to assume it's app store rating is a logical leap.
- cwyers 12y agoWell, the source of the image claims that it's about App Store ratings. It's not like we're making an intuitive leap here.
- albedoa 12y agoThe submitter is asking for an original source, not for the very source that he or she submitted. The person who tweeted it doesn't know any more than we do.
- franzpeterstein 12y agoword.
- smackfu 12y agoIf the paid-for app ratings don't do it like this, I would be surprised.
- coralreef 12y agoGaming the system will always be apart of the game.
- flycaliguy 12y agoShe could possibly make more money touring with a sound mixer and synthesizer apps on all those. I'd go see some live complex drone music, I'd help her set it up.
- MichaelGG 12y agoIt's quite probable if someone is manually entering ratings on hundreds of phones, that the owner of the phones is not the same person doing the labor. Is there a reason that you think she, in particular, would make money using a synth app on those phones, versus anyone else?
- flycaliguy 12y agoIf she doesn't own them she should consider asking her boss if she can open for Melt Banana sometime. What would happen if you used each phone to call another phone on the rack and then put them all on speaker phone? The feedback would be fascinating. What if you created a FaceTime array in which each phone connected to an audience member's phone? You could then place tone emitters throughout the venue and the physical placement of each participant would shape a chord assembled on stage. So much room for creativity beyond the creative grey market businessman's greed. That was the point of my post.
- MichaelGG 12y agoThere's room for how many app store ratings companies/employees? With a reasonably stable income, too. There's room for how many iPhone feedback musicians? In fact, what you're suggesting may have already happened. Boss took a set of iPhones, then ran a band. And then bought more iPhones to grow his ratings business. So the image you see would be the same, regardless.
- LiweiZ 12y agoThat's why I feel lucky that my very first attempt to make a food rating app for China market failed at product building stage almost 3 years ago.
- dudus 12y agoThis looks something quite easy to detect and ignore if apple was serious about ratings
- thrownaway2424 12y agoThere's no reason to believe they are serious about them. Search and ratings in the App Store are both awful.
- smackfu 12y agoWhen people have a company based around abusing your systems, it's never "quite easy" to get around them.
- mef 12y agoHow would you detect it? Any detection algorithm that springs to mind seems easily defeatable. These devices are most likely all on individual pay-as-you-go cellular cards, each with their own iTunes account. Each review is probably either only a star rating, or for text-based reviews a randomly generated unique paragraph. You could detect similar texts but that's just an arms race against new corpora being added to their generator. Maybe detect the same app getting a lot of similar ratings in a period of time? But then the farm could just randomize the input list of apps among the farmers and stretch out the time period to make it look like more natural traffic. Thoughts?
- lelandbatey 12y agoI think that those kinds of things are necessary to fight spam. Gmail isn't great at detecting spam because there's some invincible algorithm invented 10 years ago that catches everything and hasn't changed. To block spam, Gmail is always adapting it's spam filtering bases on behavior of spammers. I believe one would probably have to do the same thing to moderate app store rating.
- mikeryan 12y agomultiple high ratings for the same app coming in over a short period of time via the same external IP or GPS location?
- zmanian 12y agoAmazing illustration of a Sybil attack
- pbhjpbhj 12y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_attack http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_attack - didn't know that one: "The Sybil attack in computer security is an attack wherein a reputation system is subverted by forging identities in peer-to-peer networks. It is named after the subject of the book Sybil, a case study of a woman diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder. [...]"
- baq 12y agoI'm surprised the crowd here is surprised... you can also hire Chinese to solve catchpas, etc. and it's on the cheap side of things.
- pound 12y agoplenty of captchas solved by presenting them to pron sites visitors
- jader201 12y agoI definitely wasn't surprised, as I've known this principle has been going on for some time. But I, for some reason, thought this could be done somehow with a single device, or something. I never really knew how it happened, just knew that it happened. So this picture answered that question for me (though I'm sure this isn't the only way it can or is being executed).
- downandout 12y agoWouldn't it be easier to just use Mechanical Turk for this?
- rxaxm 12y agowouldn't they need iphones?
- jscheel 12y agoFiverr's headquarters exposed.
- bhartzer 12y agoIt doesn't look like there is any EXIF data in the image, perhaps because it's been opened and saved so many times. If we had the original image, that might shed some light as to where/when it was taken.
- nostromo 12y agoTwitter strips EXIF. Most big sites do.
- kefka 12y agoTineye also shows no hits on that image. I was half-hoping that this image was somewhere...
- ljk 12y agowhy do they strip the EXIF?
- katbyte 12y agoi imagine it is to protect the identify and location of people who post images and have no idea about exif/how to strip it. Also saves us who do know from the hassle of stripping it out on our phones before posting ourselves.
- mFixman 12y agoCan't you do this more efficiently opening several instances of an emulator on a powerful computer?
- terhechte 12y agoNot for iOS
- 0942v8653 12y agoYou wouldn't need iOS, you could do it perfectly fine in iTunes on Windows or OS X.
- woebtz 12y ago1) Setup VM with OSX, 2) Sign-in iTunes account created with a gift card, 3) Download/purchase app in iTunes (OSX), 4) Rate app in iTunes (OSX). Step 3 might require a physical device, but 1, 2, and 4 do not.
- GenerocUsername 12y agoAnd everybody shits on google for trying to tie personalization to everything. Do you want to sort your apps by the the rank and reviews of chinese laborors? Or do you want it to prioritize ratings by people you actually know? Personalization is really the only way to nuke the arms race that is fraud/spam detection and crowd-sourced data. There is no perfect answer. Just more abstract games to play.
- Cakez0r 12y agoWould I like more privacy... or more accurate app reviews... Hmmmm...
- jtwebman 12y agoNa they would just create 1000's of personalities. Maybe by IP Address and time with personalities would work or even better stop ranking by it at all. I would say having a group of trusted reviewers would be the best way to handle that. Nothing is a good substitute for trusted content curators.
- hahainternet 12y ago> I would say having a group of trusted reviewers would be the best way to handle that. Nothing is a good substitute for trusted content curators. The point they are making is that with Google, your friends app reviews matter more than random peoples.
- jtwebman 12y agoBut I also follow my non-friends as well, I also might trust one friend more then another for their opinions.
- benihana 12y agoThat's a false dichotomy. The choice is not between tie your identity to everything or Chinese rating farms (nice work invoking the scary Chinese other as some specter that is ruining our app processes by the way - remember when the Japanese were ruining everything in the 80s?). There is enormous room for improvement in app rating procedures and process. Saying the only choice we have is what you consider the lesser or two evils based on the current state of the current system is almost laughably short sighted.
- Retr0spectrum 12y agoI wonder if it is possible to reverse-engineer the whole iTunes connection and review process, and send fake reviews automatically from a server, or even from a botnet.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- joeyspn 12y agoIn that pic there are roughly 18*6=108 devices per panel. On the other side of the girl it seem there's another panel which could have another ~108 devices. That's 216 good reviews/votes coming from a single asian lady... notbad.jpg
- shanemhansen 12y agoThe technical term is "growth hacking"
- wonjun 12y agolol