I created a fake business and bought it an online reputation • Hacker News Board

Re: I created a fake business and bought it an online reputation

#11

Post by matthewmacleod » Thu, Sep 17, 2015, 9:30 AM UTC

This site brought up at lease two separate overlay popups while attempting to read it. I don't usually complain about this, but that's totally obnoxious and meant I didn't finish reading the article.

Is there a good method to block this aggressively user-unfriendly bullshit?

Re: I created a fake business and bought it an online reputation

#12

Post by nhebb » Thu, Sep 17, 2015, 9:31 AM UTC

idonthaveaname wrote: post #5

I'd have read that but I didn't get more than two lines in before an overlay appeared in front of the content. So I gave up.

Right-click, inspect, then delete a node or two.

Re: I created a fake business and bought it an online reputation

#13

Post by m12k » Thu, Sep 17, 2015, 9:31 AM UTC

"Facebook says it uses pattern recognition to find and eliminate click farms and accounts that exist solely to like pages. Since March, says Facebook, it’s “notified 200,000 Pages that we’ve protected their accounts from fake likes.” I love the way they put this: “Protected,” as if the companies hadn’t paid for them."

This may be more accurate than the author of this article believes. I've read elsewhere that precisely because FB is using pattern recognition to combat this, the cleverest of the fake accounts spend a certain amount of their time doing random/normal stuff to avoid detection. And this includes liking random businesses. And one of the problems is that if a legitimate business pays FB to promote one of their posts (so it is shown to a bigger percentage of their followers), then the more fake followers they have, the more real money they are wasting to advertise to bots. So if a business is actually using FB to engage with their userbase, then the fake likes are in fact detrimental to them.

Re: I created a fake business and bought it an online reputation

#14

Post by JupiterMoon » Thu, Sep 17, 2015, 9:32 AM UTC

orng wrote: post #9

WA wrote: post #4

That was a good write-up. Thing is, this works. Even (or especially) for startups. Only if to kickstart the hype a bit. Real followers and likes will follow, but let's be honest here: Who doesn't automatically trust a business that has 19K Twitter followers and a few good reviews out there? From the article: And these days, which is more real: a fake business with a real website or a brick and mortar business with no…

> Real followers and likes will follow, but let's be honest here: Who doesn't automatically trust a business that has 19K Twitter followers and a few good reviews out there? For now. As more companies cheat the system, people will be less likely to trust them based on things like followers and reviews.

Currently I don't trust the reviews of lots of physical businesses in my area. In my experience places with few reviews tend to be more reliable than those with many. My theory is that customers of physical businesses are more likely to leave reviews of negative experiences and that businesses respond with fake reviews. This is because there is a high 'activation energy' to making an online review of a place that you normally walk into and that only really angry customer bother. I tend to trust e.g. App store reviews more because the barrier to entry to leaving a review is lower so real positive reviews seem to happen more.

I find this sad.

Re: I created a fake business and bought it an online reputation

#15

Post by chinathrow » Thu, Sep 17, 2015, 9:35 AM UTC

"He claimed he’d created 5 million Twitter accounts using scripts, and had completed 10,000 Fiverr orders for Twitter followers. He’d been banned from Fiverr three times before but says he doesn’t know why."

Duh...

Re: I created a fake business and bought it an online reputation

#16

Post by steaminghacker » Thu, Sep 17, 2015, 9:42 AM UTC

matthewmacleod wrote: post #11

This site brought up at lease two separate overlay popups while attempting to read it. I don't usually complain about this, but that's totally obnoxious and meant I didn't finish reading the article. Is there a good method to block this aggressively user-unfriendly bullshit?

Telerik Fiddler2. I use the autoresponder to block patterns.

Re: I created a fake business and bought it an online reputation

#17

Post by mintplant » Thu, Sep 17, 2015, 9:44 AM UTC

matthewmacleod wrote: post #11

This site brought up at lease two separate overlay popups while attempting to read it. I don't usually complain about this, but that's totally obnoxious and meant I didn't finish reading the article. Is there a good method to block this aggressively user-unfriendly bullshit?

uBlock?

Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/ublock/

Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublock-origin/cjpa...

Safari: https://www.ublock.org/newdl/safari/0.9.5.2

Alternatively: Firefox has a built-in "Reader View" button in the address bar that extracts just the text and formats it for easy reading.

Re: I created a fake business and bought it an online reputation

#18

Post by alphadevx » Thu, Sep 17, 2015, 9:44 AM UTC

matthewmacleod wrote: post #11

This site brought up at lease two separate overlay popups while attempting to read it. I don't usually complain about this, but that's totally obnoxious and meant I didn't finish reading the article. Is there a good method to block this aggressively user-unfriendly bullshit?

I read it in "reader view" in FF, that done the trick.

Re: I created a fake business and bought it an online reputation

#19

Post by slazaro » Thu, Sep 17, 2015, 9:46 AM UTC

matthewmacleod wrote: post #11

This site brought up at lease two separate overlay popups while attempting to read it. I don't usually complain about this, but that's totally obnoxious and meant I didn't finish reading the article. Is there a good method to block this aggressively user-unfriendly bullshit?

I always use Firefox's Reader View when reading text-based articles. Especially on mobile. It makes the pages all the same, distraction-free, and fast to scroll.

Re: I created a fake business and bought it an online reputation

#20

Post by marwann » Thu, Sep 17, 2015, 9:46 AM UTC

In France, an agency created a fake company selling kebap sandwich on Mars. They had 105.000 views on their video, 46k followers, 20k facebook fans...and orders.

What's scary isn't the fact people buy fake reviews/followers/etc. but the fact people actually believe in these vanity metrics and want to order afterwards.