5 ms·

Google's Panda and Penguin algorithm updates really hurt spam and low quality "blogspam" type sites. It was a pretty huge overhaul that changed the game. I won

Google's Panda and Penguin algorithm updates really hurt spam and low quality "blogspam" type sites. It was a pretty huge overhaul that changed the game. I wonder if facebook is working on such an update. One which would squash most of these click farms. I would think, given their resources, they would. The fact that they haven't yet leads me to believe they think this is a necessary evil and that they willingly allow it to continue.

msabalau 11y ago
Links to low quality blogspam threatened the quality of Google's results. Do inflated "likes" for brands or celebrities harm the core value prop for consumers or Facebook's business model with advertisers? If not, why do anything, esp. if addressing it kills their scary/differentiating "people in the world with Facebook accounts" metric.
- anon1385 11y ago
  >Do inflated "likes" for brands or celebrities harm the core value prop for consumers or Facebook's business model with advertisers? The argument presented in the article is that they do: >These fake likes weren’t just an empty number. Whenever Second Floor Music posted content, Facebook’s algorithms placed it on the newsfeeds of a small, random sample of fans—the people who had liked Second Floor Music—and measured how many “engaged” with the content. High levels of engagement meant that the content was deemed interesting and redistributed to more fans for free—the main goal of most businesses that use social media is to reach this tipping point where content spreads virally. But the fake fans never engaged, depressing each post’s score and leaving it dead on arrival. The social media boost Bronstein had paid for never happened. Even worse, she now had thousands of fake fans who made it nearly impossible to reach her real fans. Bronstein struggled to get help from Facebook, reaching out repeatedly through help forums, but, in the end, she scrapped the original page and started again from scratch. Second Floor Music had effectively paid to ruin one of its flagship Facebook pages.
  - glesica 11y ago
    > But the fake fans never engaged, depressing each post’s score and leaving it dead on arrival. Sounds like a business opportunity. Fake fans who actually engage with content. They could even post fake comments and falsely claim they are planning to attend events. What a wonderful future we've built for ourselves.
  - msabalau 11y ago
    The harm is coming from Second Floor Music chasing the wrong metric: advertising to get followers as if having more likes was valuable in and of itself. Over the long term, Facebook advertising is only useful if it builds a brand or prompts a direct response. Facebook may opportunistically make money in the short term by taking money from people looking to push up a vanity metric, but presumably they aren't addressing the fake follower problem because paying for followers isn't a sustainable business, or core to how they'll make money over the long run.
    - bronzetini 11y ago
      Hi Msabalau -- Building a Facebook page is an important part of building our brand and engaging with users to nurture leads -- not only to convert in the short-term, but to build long lasting relationships. It's especially important for us because our products are simple digital downloads that go for as little as $1.50 each, so we need lifelong customers. We did not buy likes and I am not concerned with how many people like our page. I'm concerned with our engagement rate and reach -- which is (now) phenomenal. In the campaigns I have administered (after the incident that the article reported), I've created carefully targeted campaigns with high-quality copy. The New Republic article, however, discusses our first campaign, which was unfortunately low-quality and poorly targeted. Instead of learning that we hadn't created a good ad by seeing bad engagement, we learned by having our page overrun with fake likes who could not be removed. That's not a typical response for an ad buy, which is a real problem with Facebook's system. Thanks for reading the story! Rachel Bronstein, Web Editor, Second Floor Music
zo1 11y ago
"I wonder if facebook is working on such an update. One which would squash most of these click farms. I would think, given their resources, they would." Judging from the anecdotal amount of blatantly "fake" accounts I've reported to Facebook, and seen nothing done about... I'd have to say that they don't "care" all that much short of plausible deniability. Accounts, likes, clicks, views are all currency to Facebook, which it trades to prospective companies in exchange for real money.
- blumkvist 11y ago
  You think they will take manual action on individual accounts you reported?
  - zo1 11y ago
    That all depends on volumes, I guess. I don't expect them to put an investigator on every report. There are ways and means to get reliable data out of reports. Example time. FB get's 10 individual and separate reports for one specific account being fake. Let's assume this is some sort of "spike", and unusual. They then have an investigator manually check this account, and verify if it is a real account or not. If X people report it as fake, then it's likely a fake account, therefore human-intervention is required to confirm. Then, stage two. After taking action, they note that those 10 individuals who reported this account matched the outcome of the human investigator. We could then infer that those accounts are: A. Less likely to be fake themselves. And B. More reliable signals of fake accounts. So, next time around. Perhaps the cumulative, or "enhanced" scoring of those accounts' reports requires a lower threshold for human intervention.
    - blumkvist 11y ago
      This is chasing your tail. Fighting spam at a big level is not as easy as people think it is.
realusername 11y ago
The problem also of this kind of updates is that they drastically affect the service during the change. It took at least 6 to 8 months for Google to recover back to the quality of search they had before the update. Now everything works fine but just after the Panda update, it was a complete disaster in terms of quality. But maybe it's a necessary evil, I can't think of another solution for this kind of problem.
username3 11y ago
If they have an update, they would use it when they've peaked and can use it as an excuse for a huge drop in active users.
discardorama 11y ago
> The fact that they haven't yet leads me to believe they think this is a necessary evil and that they willingly allow it to continue. A cynical view would be: why are fake accounts bad for Facebook? These fake accounts help boost the number of users they report every quarter. These accounts don't use any server-side resources. They just sit around generating "likes", and with each "like" Facebook hears a cha-ching!

msabalau 11y ago

Links to low quality blogspam threatened the quality of Google's results. Do inflated "likes" for brands or celebrities harm the core value prop for consumers or Facebook's business model with advertisers? If not, why do anything, esp. if addressing it kills their scary/differentiating "people in the world with Facebook accounts" metric.

anon1385 11y ago
>Do inflated "likes" for brands or celebrities harm the core value prop for consumers or Facebook's business model with advertisers? The argument presented in the article is that they do: >These fake likes weren’t just an empty number. Whenever Second Floor Music posted content, Facebook’s algorithms placed it on the newsfeeds of a small, random sample of fans—the people who had liked Second Floor Music—and measured how many “engaged” with the content. High levels of engagement meant that the content was deemed interesting and redistributed to more fans for free—the main goal of most businesses that use social media is to reach this tipping point where content spreads virally. But the fake fans never engaged, depressing each post’s score and leaving it dead on arrival. The social media boost Bronstein had paid for never happened. Even worse, she now had thousands of fake fans who made it nearly impossible to reach her real fans. Bronstein struggled to get help from Facebook, reaching out repeatedly through help forums, but, in the end, she scrapped the original page and started again from scratch. Second Floor Music had effectively paid to ruin one of its flagship Facebook pages.
- glesica 11y ago
  > But the fake fans never engaged, depressing each post’s score and leaving it dead on arrival. Sounds like a business opportunity. Fake fans who actually engage with content. They could even post fake comments and falsely claim they are planning to attend events. What a wonderful future we've built for ourselves.
- msabalau 11y ago
  The harm is coming from Second Floor Music chasing the wrong metric: advertising to get followers as if having more likes was valuable in and of itself. Over the long term, Facebook advertising is only useful if it builds a brand or prompts a direct response. Facebook may opportunistically make money in the short term by taking money from people looking to push up a vanity metric, but presumably they aren't addressing the fake follower problem because paying for followers isn't a sustainable business, or core to how they'll make money over the long run.
  - bronzetini 11y ago
    Hi Msabalau -- Building a Facebook page is an important part of building our brand and engaging with users to nurture leads -- not only to convert in the short-term, but to build long lasting relationships. It's especially important for us because our products are simple digital downloads that go for as little as $1.50 each, so we need lifelong customers. We did not buy likes and I am not concerned with how many people like our page. I'm concerned with our engagement rate and reach -- which is (now) phenomenal. In the campaigns I have administered (after the incident that the article reported), I've created carefully targeted campaigns with high-quality copy. The New Republic article, however, discusses our first campaign, which was unfortunately low-quality and poorly targeted. Instead of learning that we hadn't created a good ad by seeing bad engagement, we learned by having our page overrun with fake likes who could not be removed. That's not a typical response for an ad buy, which is a real problem with Facebook's system. Thanks for reading the story! Rachel Bronstein, Web Editor, Second Floor Music

zo1 11y ago

"I wonder if facebook is working on such an update. One which would squash most of these click farms. I would think, given their resources, they would." Judging from the anecdotal amount of blatantly "fake" accounts I've reported to Facebook, and seen nothing done about... I'd have to say that they don't "care" all that much short of plausible deniability. Accounts, likes, clicks, views are all currency to Facebook, which it trades to prospective companies in exchange for real money.

blumkvist 11y ago
You think they will take manual action on individual accounts you reported?
- zo1 11y ago
  That all depends on volumes, I guess. I don't expect them to put an investigator on every report. There are ways and means to get reliable data out of reports. Example time. FB get's 10 individual and separate reports for one specific account being fake. Let's assume this is some sort of "spike", and unusual. They then have an investigator manually check this account, and verify if it is a real account or not. If X people report it as fake, then it's likely a fake account, therefore human-intervention is required to confirm. Then, stage two. After taking action, they note that those 10 individuals who reported this account matched the outcome of the human investigator. We could then infer that those accounts are: A. Less likely to be fake themselves. And B. More reliable signals of fake accounts. So, next time around. Perhaps the cumulative, or "enhanced" scoring of those accounts' reports requires a lower threshold for human intervention.
  - blumkvist 11y ago
    This is chasing your tail. Fighting spam at a big level is not as easy as people think it is.

realusername 11y ago

The problem also of this kind of updates is that they drastically affect the service during the change. It took at least 6 to 8 months for Google to recover back to the quality of search they had before the update. Now everything works fine but just after the Panda update, it was a complete disaster in terms of quality. But maybe it's a necessary evil, I can't think of another solution for this kind of problem.

username3 11y ago

If they have an update, they would use it when they've peaked and can use it as an excuse for a huge drop in active users.

discardorama 11y ago

> The fact that they haven't yet leads me to believe they think this is a necessary evil and that they willingly allow it to continue. A cynical view would be: why are fake accounts bad for Facebook? These fake accounts help boost the number of users they report every quarter. These accounts don't use any server-side resources. They just sit around generating "likes", and with each "like" Facebook hears a cha-ching!