A Pinterest spammer tells all
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A Pinterest spammer tells all
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Re: A Pinterest spammer tells all
#2So-called "skimming" of links does not strike me as being terribly wrong (or different from what Pinterest does itself), but the practice likely still undercuts their bizmodel because they don't skim links that already have affiliate ids attached to them.
Re: A Pinterest spammer tells all
#3I'm not suggesting that this is trivial to implement, but in principle, wouldn't it be fairly simple for Pinterest to identify these guys based on their 'social networks'? If a group of accounts only 'pins' posts of other accounts in that same group, that suggests either a spambot farm, or a very inclusive group of friends. False-positive detection could be decreased by looking at account sign-up dates, or profile photos.
Re: A Pinterest spammer tells all
#4As Google is killing more and more content farms, it makes sense spammers are moving towards sites that have tons of authority, and spamming there. Can't get "buy car insurance" to rank for your spamblog? No problem, create a fake question in Yahoo Answers with the keywords in your title, and a fake answer with your affiliate link. Repeat in Pinterest, Amazon Askville, Quora, etc.
Re: A Pinterest spammer tells all
#5I'm not suggesting that this is trivial to implement, but in principle, wouldn't it be fairly simple for Pinterest to identify these guys based on their 'social networks'? If a group of accounts only 'pins' posts of other accounts in that same group, that suggests either a spambot farm, or a very inclusive group of friends. False-positive detection could be decreased by looking at account sign-up dates, or profile ph…
It's fun to imagine large social networks of bots which are indistinguishable (from Pinterest's/Facebook's/Twitter's P.O.V.) from human social networks. Here, it could be a 1-man spamming operation, but you can imagine government-scale astroturfing.
Re: A Pinterest spammer tells all
#6An easy way to find Pinterest spammers.
http://pinterest.com/source/amazon.com/
I think the spammer moved his affiliate tag to womansdesign-20.
Re: A Pinterest spammer tells all
#7There are multiple angles to this story, and each has a compelling narrative.
Social sites are not just games or freebies. They exist based on the premise that they can use human nature against itself in order to create free content from users to be consumed by other users. At the end of this road we have Facebook, where they spend tens of millions of dollars to program users to create and consume like you'd program an alarm clock.
The spammers of course are in it for nobody but themselves, so it's tough to ding them any more than the rest of folks. At least most of them seem honest about it.
There's a third party here too, though: the honest internet citizen who likes creating and sharing content and making money while doing so. They don't run bots and they actually review the stuff they talk about.
The spammers make their money because they can "fake out" the system to think they're the honest money-making folks. The danger here is that we're going to only end up with two giant contenders, the addictive social sites and the spammers. That the little guys get crushed. To me it seems that the web, once wide open, is closing in bit by bit. (That probably sounds hyperbolic. Apologies.)
Re: A Pinterest spammer tells all
#8What exactly is outrageous about a community service like Pinterest or a forum using Skimlinks?
Re: A Pinterest spammer tells all
#9An easy way to find Pinterest spammers. http://pinterest.com/source/amazon.com/ I think the spammer moved his affiliate tag to womansdesign-20.
It's also an easy way to generate a lot of false positives. To be a spammer does not mean to take advantage of affiliate revenue. I would say this method would be too sloppy to use by itself. It would need to be a small part of a larger set of signals.
Edit: DanielBMarkham's comment does a better job of conveying why this would be a bad approach.
Re: A Pinterest spammer tells all
#10There are multiple angles to this story, and each has a compelling narrative. Social sites are not just games or freebies. They exist based on the premise that they can use human nature against itself in order to create free content from users to be consumed by other users. At the end of this road we have Facebook, where they spend tens of millions of dollars to program users to create and consume like you'd program…
The problem is that that third party is complicit in allowing this ecosystem to exist. If they would just pony up a dollar or two a month, they could exist in a world without spammers. That's all it would take.