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I created a fake business and bought it an online reputation

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

#21

There's a whole seedy world under the surface of Fiverr, and I'm surprised no one seems to have done an in-depth "Inside Fiverr" piece yet. Vectorization services that present as individuals in the US but are actually farmed out to workshops in non-English speaking countries. Voice actors whose work samples consist mainly of dubious get-rich-quick ads. And as this article points out, "SEO" and "reputation building" s…

Really, even yoga?

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

#22
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…

Reminds me of reddit, and their fake users to start it off.

The thing is that the internet is so biased towards incumbents, you need to cheat a little to get the initial pull.

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

#23

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.

uBlock didn't fix it for me. Also, because the second overlay was huge, I couldn't close it down so I closed the tab instead...

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

#24
post #13

"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 precise…

Great points

> And one of the problems is that if a legitimate business pays FB to promote one of their posts

The same applies to non-paid content. Facebook will only expose your content to a portion of your users, obviously the more fake users you have the fewer real people you'll reach. Engagement levels have shown to decrease when adding fake users in previous experiments.

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

#26
post #13

"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 precise…

I would like to add that if they would punish the businesses, this could of course be abused: if I have to pay $50 to have my competitor have serious spam issues with Facebook, possibly resulting in a penalty, that is some serious damage I could do.

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

#28
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…

As an example, reddit kickstarted the hype quite well, and see, now they're worth 500 million ;)

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

#29
post #13

"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 precise…

Not just a problem if you spend money promoting to unwanted fake likes - EdgeRank decides who sees your un-promoted content based in part upon your average engagement levels, if half of your fans never engage because they are fake then your stats look worse to Facebook and so your content will be seen by a lower proportion of your real fans, even before you start spending $ promoting stuff.

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

#30
post #13

"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 precise…

Veritaseum did a nice analysis and summary of this exact situation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjag
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