4 ms·

There has been very little incentive to verify any accounts when part of the selling point of your platform is "we have x billions of active accounts", where or

There has been very little incentive to verify any accounts when part of the selling point of your platform is "we have x billions of active accounts", where or not the accounts are real.

visakanv 11y ago
Especially bearing in mind that these figures affect the actual amounts of $$ that advertisers are charged!
abalone 11y ago
Not really true. Spam accounts degrade the quality of the experience, leading to an eventual collapse of real users. It's more a matter of long term vs short term incentives. Focusing on the short term might lead a fly by night startup to boost user counts unscrupulously, but FB is focused on long term sustainable growth.
- spb 11y ago
  I think they give "long term sustainable growth" a lot of lip service, but what they're actually focused on is "as much outwardly-seeming growth as can be manufactured via whatever means possible". This is why they're slash-and-burning their way into "developing markets" with projects like internet.org: they're the only parts of the world left that they haven't sucked dry.
- hnnewguy 11y ago
  >Not really true. Spam accounts degrade the quality of the experience, leading to an eventual collapse of real users. You say it isn't true, then describe the scenario that is actually happening today, described in this article: a lower quality experience for users and advertisers. The problem exists because of misaligned incentives. Sure, if advertising and users growth plummet due to the problem, Facebook will be forced to do something. But it's happening now and little is being done. The spam accounts are not new. I worked for a relatively successful gaming company during the social gaming goldrush a few years ago. While doing some research into cheating in our game, we looked at trying to determine players who were using multiple accounts. We figured that close to half of the daily user accounts were fake. Half. Hell, each of us had multiple accounts ourselves, since we did a lot of testing and market-research, and didn't want to inundate our real-life streams with spammy game updates. Of course, when the value of your company rests on those DAU figures, no one is going to talk about it. Just report what it says.

There has been very little incentive to verify any accounts when part of the selling point of your platform is "we have x billions of active accounts", where or not the accounts are real.

visakanv 11y ago

Especially bearing in mind that these figures affect the actual amounts of $$ that advertisers are charged!

abalone 11y ago

Not really true. Spam accounts degrade the quality of the experience, leading to an eventual collapse of real users. It's more a matter of long term vs short term incentives. Focusing on the short term might lead a fly by night startup to boost user counts unscrupulously, but FB is focused on long term sustainable growth.

spb 11y ago
I think they give "long term sustainable growth" a lot of lip service, but what they're actually focused on is "as much outwardly-seeming growth as can be manufactured via whatever means possible". This is why they're slash-and-burning their way into "developing markets" with projects like internet.org: they're the only parts of the world left that they haven't sucked dry.
hnnewguy 11y ago
>Not really true. Spam accounts degrade the quality of the experience, leading to an eventual collapse of real users. You say it isn't true, then describe the scenario that is actually happening today, described in this article: a lower quality experience for users and advertisers. The problem exists because of misaligned incentives. Sure, if advertising and users growth plummet due to the problem, Facebook will be forced to do something. But it's happening now and little is being done. The spam accounts are not new. I worked for a relatively successful gaming company during the social gaming goldrush a few years ago. While doing some research into cheating in our game, we looked at trying to determine players who were using multiple accounts. We figured that close to half of the daily user accounts were fake. Half. Hell, each of us had multiple accounts ourselves, since we did a lot of testing and market-research, and didn't want to inundate our real-life streams with spammy game updates. Of course, when the value of your company rests on those DAU figures, no one is going to talk about it. Just report what it says.