61–70 of 118 posts
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The spammer in the article makes two thousand dollars a day from his army of spambots. Even if he started running two thousand bots on monday, he'd be pulling a profit by tuesday.
Payment would be the unique identifier. Creating a ton of email addresses to uniquely identify each account is easy. It's a lot hard to find multiple unique payment methods so you won't show up as the same person.
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We aren't on the same page. You think it generates a lot of false positives. I don't.
You don't, yet when you go to explain how it could be used you include two other signals (came from Twitter, posts many items more than once) in order to make it work. I had originally said "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." So alright, we aren't on the same page, but you're saying exactly what I just said.
Aside from the (good) conversation here, I'm actually shocked the guy agreed to an interview. How many HN people just spent some time thinking about how you would do one of these? Not that nobody could have possibly thought about pinterest spamming before, but this interview has certainly increased knowledge of it
If he is pinning relevant pictures to themed board and simply doing it at scale, is he really abusing the site? e.g: pictures of cakes on a recipe board about desserts that link back to a cookbook and he gets 4 cents per click through...
An easy way to find Pinterest spammers. http://pinterest.com/source/amazon.com/ I think the spammer moved his affiliate tag to womansdesign-20.
How are they not picking it up as spam? The same affiliate link from multiple accounts... The description also looks like a snippet of one the product reviews on Amazon
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Does Paypal not allow multiple accounts tied to the same bank account?
They don't allow that. My wife tried to add her checking account to a business-related paypal account, but it was already on her personal account so they didn't let her connect it.
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> simply doing it at scale That's the most abusive part. As a Pinterest user I want to see what other real users are pinning. I don't want to see what 4,000 bots are pinning.
I had a real love affair with Pinterest for one semester. Spammers or not, it is simply too crowded now. Last week, I found Piccsy. I'll be using it now in place of Pinterest until spammers arrive.
If you have any handy, can you send one my way?
As 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.
Affiliate links are filtered out of Yahoo Answers, or at least they were 4 or 5 years ago when I posted one.
If he is pinning relevant pictures to themed board and simply doing it at scale, is he really abusing the site? e.g: pictures of cakes on a recipe board about desserts that link back to a cookbook and he gets 4 cents per click through...
Will Skimlinks (or someone similar) offer a reverse-affiliate service that strips affiliate IDs from links on your site instead of adding them? Does this already exist? (It would be trivial for Pinterest to manually do this, say, for Amazon, which could instantly crush a spam model based only on Amazon, without any spam network detection/banning required) Personally, though, I think affiliate links in social networks…
Skimlinks already ignores their redirect if the link is already affiliated so I'm guessing they could just reverse this logic & have a solution.