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

#101

Post by gorhill » Thu, Sep 17, 2015, 2:35 PM UTC

VerminOctopus1 wrote: post #91

gorhill wrote: post #48

A personal observation in the Chrome store. I created an extension which I published in the Chrome store. I did notice a curious statistics with another similar purpose extension, which is also quite popular -- both are over 1 million users: The ratings-per-user ratio for the other extension is almost 5 times that of my extension.[1] I can't figure any other convincing explanation for this other than the other extens…

Perhaps the other extension is prompting the user for a rating like you see so often in Android/iOS apps. This tactic genuinely works. If not, then yes, it's plausible that they're buying ratings.

Good point, I didn't think of this... I looked and it does indeed invite users to rate it in at the top of its options page. So as far as I am concerned this explains the difference.

I could probably quantify how much this works by adding the same sort of invitation to rate but this would go counter to the spirit of the project, so I will pass on the experimentation.

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

#102

Post by wpietri » Thu, Sep 17, 2015, 2:36 PM UTC

vijayr wrote: post #79

Yes, writing fake reviews is illegal. False advertising is a misdemeanor crime Does this mean those Amazon affiliate sites are illegal too? A lot of these sites review products as if they have used the them, but there is no way they could've paid real money for the dozens of products they review? Also, how is this different from celebrities endorsing products and appearing in ads? How do we know they bothered to use…

My guess is that most celebrity endorsements happen after at least some examination of the product. After all, celebrities have brands to protect too. And I imagine their endorsements are carefully worded; it's only false advertising when somebody says something that isn't true.

Of course, as you demonstrate here, there's at least some public understanding that celebrity endorsements aren't actually reviews, so a good lawyer would argue that since you don't expect celebrity endorsements to be factually true, they couldn't possibly be false advertising.

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

#103

Post by iaskwhy » Thu, Sep 17, 2015, 2:36 PM UTC

codingdave wrote: post #40

iaskwhy wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Right click, Inspect Element, Delete. most of those seem to be about 20 divs deep, but usually have a parent div labelled "modal_something", so move up the chain and delete that parent. It is annoying to have to do that, so I only do it if I truly care about reading the page. But once it is in your browser, it is in your control. Use that control.

I do it a lot for Stylebot but only a really small minority of websites deserve that waste of time. It's a good tip, one I tell everyone I know about, most sites I read on a daily basis are highly tweaked by the Inspect Element tool plus Stylebot.

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

#104

Post by radlad » Thu, Sep 17, 2015, 2:43 PM UTC

oalders wrote: post #90

wanderfowl wrote: post #70

If you're a street musician setting up to play with an open instrument case, it's pretty important to "seed the pot" by throwing a few dollars and some change into the case. Not because you make any money from your own "donation", but because it shows passers-by what the arrangement is, and adds an element of social pressure ("Somebody donated, so I should too!"). I can see this as similar. There's something pathetic…

I used to go to a cafe where they often had a $20 bill in the tip jar near the cash register. I always felt like that bill hadn't been left by a customer...

They'll exchange smaller bills for bigger bills if they need them, or if the tip jar gets too full.

source: worked in an ice cream shop

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

#105

Post by nitrogen » Thu, Sep 17, 2015, 2:44 PM UTC

sokoloff wrote: post #46

corin_ wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Presumably, the snowshoe fake likes are somewhat even distributed, so there's no reason to think legitimate business A would be preferentially punished by fake like low engagement versus legitimate business B, right?

Fake likes may be randomly distributed, but real likes are not, so evenly distributed fake likes will be more detrimental to businesses with fewer real likes.

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

#106

Post by GFischer » Thu, Sep 17, 2015, 2:47 PM UTC

m12k wrote: 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…

We did a Facebook page for an university project, and created a small campaign for it (we were trying to do landing-page style validation).

It got a lot of "likes" which looked a lot like fake accounts trying to look less suspicious, and none of them converted to the landing page, they were just clicking "like".

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

#107

Post by nkrisc » Thu, Sep 17, 2015, 2:47 PM UTC

degenerate wrote: post #76

nkrisc wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think Fiverr should hire a team to monitor the activity and authenticity of its sellers. That would cause most of their revenue to evaporate.

They also don't have a "report this post" button anywhere to allow people to flag spam or illegal activity. That would at least be something they could do...

Great point. If they won't actively police their sellers at least they could let visitors volunteer to do so through such a feature.

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

#108

Post by icedchai » Thu, Sep 17, 2015, 2:48 PM UTC

This puts most corporate marketing departments to shame.

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

#109

Post by 811639047892938 » Thu, Sep 17, 2015, 2:50 PM UTC

When it comes to Twitter, these services are necessary, if a business is to EVER get any followers.

There's a fact that not many people talk about, that real (actual human) Twitter users are following less and less people. Joe Mande is a comedian who has been on Twitter since 2009, and his follower count went up to 80,000 steadily, but then it stalled at some point. In 2013, he did a funny project where he VERY publicly bought 920,000 followers (if I recall, he paid $500 to a Moldovan guy who added the followers over a matter of months).

It was partly comedy (or perhaps performance art??), but he gave an interview at the time saying that there was a point where it just became very tough to get (legitimate) new followers, and it's true.

I myself have a follower count that's been at around 7000 for years now, and even when I have someone huge retweet something I said, I get maybe 3 new followers for every 500 retweets. I have discussed this with friends in similar positions, and I think the problem is that everyone already just follows too damn many people,and nobody wants to add more.

So to me, this is why Fiverr is important for new businesses - go ahead and launch a brand new business and see how long it takes to get to even 100 followers, much less the multiple thousands that make you look "legitimate" to many users, it will take you years. For a local business in meatspace, even 100 REAL customers following you is a herculean task. Fiverr is the only way to make it look like you are not just some random fly by night company that nobody uses.

Adding to this trouble is the fact that Twitter is incentivized NOT to remove all the old fake followers that they KNOW are there. Every Twitter user has a lot of fake followers, just because Twitter used to be completely apathetic and terrible at removing them. All the old bots goosed Twitter's numbers GREATLY, so why would they have removed them? So now, they can't go back and take hundreds of followers away from random people who only have 300 followers, because those people will go CRAZY and hate Twitter.

But when you look around Twitter now, SO many people have 500 followers, if you're a new restaurant with 7 followers, you look PATHETIC.

Note: Joe Mande still has his 1 Million bots and it's worth googling "joe mande bots" to find funny articles about his quest.

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

#110

Post by 811639047892938 » Thu, Sep 17, 2015, 2:51 PM UTC

wanderfowl wrote: post #66

logicallee wrote: post #54

As an entrepreneur, I became so disappointed with this article about 60% of the way through, that I had to stop reading. When the author started getting phone calls on his burner phone from people wanting to hire his van, he should have manned up, stuck with this damn business, and written instead about bootstrapping. With stats like the ones he reported, he should have stuck with Freakin' Awesome Karaoke Express eve…

There it is, folks. The first "Pro-Life" argument to emerge from the "corporate personhood" metaphor. All downhill from here. Grab your popcorn.

This comment is the best thing I've read on HN