4 ms·

I hope someone standardizes things that go on inside social networks. Should we consider the money made from selling deceptive ads as a legal? Or is it even a p

I hope someone standardizes things that go on inside social networks. Should we consider the money made from selling deceptive ads as a legal? Or is it even a proper revenue model? (For eg. certain ads say user will get points if he takes a 2 min IQ test, and in the end the user signs up for the service unintentionally, and ends up paying a monthly bill before he notices the charge and cancels it.) And I may be wrong, but what intellectual capital does a company like this have? Anyone who buys it, is just buying the user base. And what about the future of the company? What would be the revenue 5 years later? How does a quantitative analyst factor this while calculating the worth of the company?

teej 17y ago
I feel it important to clarify a few things: Zynga has already stopped running offers (scammy ads), they're too big to buy, and they don't own their userbase (yet).
- Tiktaalik 17y ago
  There's now a Farmville.com, so that seems like a move to slowly separate away from being completely dependent on Facebook.
drawkbox 17y ago
The company with the best innovation was Playfish, EA snapped them up quickly. Playfish was building quality while Zynga was burning through users.
- jrmurad 17y ago
  I'm a user they burned through. That was before the revelations about their offer tactics. I stopped playing their No-Limit Texas Hold-em poker app because I was suspicious that it was rigged. I thought that maybe I was just a typical unlucky player who would make such a claim. I feel less sure of that after seeing the "every horrible thing in the book" remark. I think the sleazy tactic would be to hook new players onto the game by weighting the odds in their favor. For those who care... what I saw was a lucky streak when I started playing. For my style of play, that meant good hands and good flops. After a few weeks, I started seeing that people were regularly getting sucked out on and losing to very rare hands on a frequent basis. Yes, the former can be blamed on the quality and aggression levels of Internet users playing without consequence (i.e. real money). I couldn't explain the latter. I saw players call very high bets on the flop and turn and end up with runner-runner straights or flushes on the river. It felt like the game might be rewarding stupidity more often than any decent pseudo-random number generation would dictate. Again, this could just be because a higher number of stupid hands are played in their game than IRL but I think I accounted for the probabilities in my incredulity. Most damning was that I played for about about 3 hours over a 48 hour period and saw a straight flush and 3 4-of-a-kinds. I've played 4 hours a week of "bar poker" (play for chips, not money) for 1 1/2 years and have seen 2 straight flushes and 2 4-of-a-kinds total that whole time at the real tables. They're (supposed to be) rare enough that I can recall each instance with clarity.
  - boredguy8 17y ago
    Depends on where the 4-of-a-kind is happening. If I have 5-5 and board flops 7 J Q, I'm not likely to hold on to that pair, even though I could get two 5s. People playing "low pairs" with more regularity could easily lead to more 4 of a kind hits. Hell, playing 2-7 all the time can see 3 more deuces on the board.
  - swolchok 17y ago
    A few points: 1) Real tables go a lot slower than online poker. 2) Relying on pre-flop premium hands is bad deep-stack no limit strategy. No one is going to pay you off big when you've just got top pair. 3) What would be the point of rigging Zynga poker? They have exactly one method through which they pay out (the prize for the Shootout tournament), and they fix the rate at which they pay out there. 4) You can always find a small number of users testifying to the occurrence of statistically-unlikely events. Compare with testing for ESP in the presence of random guessers: with a large pool, someone will get lucky.
    - jrmurad 17y ago
      1) True 2) True 4) True 3) True. But I followed up. Signed in today for the first time in several months. My first hand was AA, I kid you not. Followed by: AQ,AT,66,KQ. Then the hands started to look normal. Within the remainder of the 30 minutes that I played though, sure enough, I was dealt 22 and two more deuces came on the flop. Another 4-of-a-kind. I still think something is fishy. If it is unbalanced, my guess would be that is to encourage new players or ones who haven't logged in for awhile to stay and play... boosting Zynga's numbers.
      - swolchok 17y ago
        Presumably this could be solved by writing a hand logger. I play the Zynga Shootout regularly and would be happy to run one, though I'm not sure how one would be able to architect it simply enough that I'd be able to audit it. Perhaps if someone reverse-engineered their network protocol; it appears to be at least partially unencrypted.
      - 17y ago

teej 17y ago

I feel it important to clarify a few things: Zynga has already stopped running offers (scammy ads), they're too big to buy, and they don't own their userbase (yet).

Tiktaalik 17y ago
There's now a Farmville.com, so that seems like a move to slowly separate away from being completely dependent on Facebook.

drawkbox 17y ago

The company with the best innovation was Playfish, EA snapped them up quickly. Playfish was building quality while Zynga was burning through users.

jrmurad 17y ago
I'm a user they burned through. That was before the revelations about their offer tactics. I stopped playing their No-Limit Texas Hold-em poker app because I was suspicious that it was rigged. I thought that maybe I was just a typical unlucky player who would make such a claim. I feel less sure of that after seeing the "every horrible thing in the book" remark. I think the sleazy tactic would be to hook new players onto the game by weighting the odds in their favor. For those who care... what I saw was a lucky streak when I started playing. For my style of play, that meant good hands and good flops. After a few weeks, I started seeing that people were regularly getting sucked out on and losing to very rare hands on a frequent basis. Yes, the former can be blamed on the quality and aggression levels of Internet users playing without consequence (i.e. real money). I couldn't explain the latter. I saw players call very high bets on the flop and turn and end up with runner-runner straights or flushes on the river. It felt like the game might be rewarding stupidity more often than any decent pseudo-random number generation would dictate. Again, this could just be because a higher number of stupid hands are played in their game than IRL but I think I accounted for the probabilities in my incredulity. Most damning was that I played for about about 3 hours over a 48 hour period and saw a straight flush and 3 4-of-a-kinds. I've played 4 hours a week of "bar poker" (play for chips, not money) for 1 1/2 years and have seen 2 straight flushes and 2 4-of-a-kinds total that whole time at the real tables. They're (supposed to be) rare enough that I can recall each instance with clarity.
- boredguy8 17y ago
  Depends on where the 4-of-a-kind is happening. If I have 5-5 and board flops 7 J Q, I'm not likely to hold on to that pair, even though I could get two 5s. People playing "low pairs" with more regularity could easily lead to more 4 of a kind hits. Hell, playing 2-7 all the time can see 3 more deuces on the board.
- swolchok 17y ago
  A few points: 1) Real tables go a lot slower than online poker. 2) Relying on pre-flop premium hands is bad deep-stack no limit strategy. No one is going to pay you off big when you've just got top pair. 3) What would be the point of rigging Zynga poker? They have exactly one method through which they pay out (the prize for the Shootout tournament), and they fix the rate at which they pay out there. 4) You can always find a small number of users testifying to the occurrence of statistically-unlikely events. Compare with testing for ESP in the presence of random guessers: with a large pool, someone will get lucky.
  - jrmurad 17y ago
    1) True 2) True 4) True 3) True. But I followed up. Signed in today for the first time in several months. My first hand was AA, I kid you not. Followed by: AQ,AT,66,KQ. Then the hands started to look normal. Within the remainder of the 30 minutes that I played though, sure enough, I was dealt 22 and two more deuces came on the flop. Another 4-of-a-kind. I still think something is fishy. If it is unbalanced, my guess would be that is to encourage new players or ones who haven't logged in for awhile to stay and play... boosting Zynga's numbers.
    - swolchok 17y ago
      Presumably this could be solved by writing a hand logger. I play the Zynga Shootout regularly and would be happy to run one, though I'm not sure how one would be able to architect it simply enough that I'd be able to audit it. Perhaps if someone reverse-engineered their network protocol; it appears to be at least partially unencrypted.
    - 17y ago