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A Pinterest spammer tells all

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Re: A Pinterest spammer tells all

#71

Post by cf0ed2aa-bdf5 »

bemmu wrote: post #69
bproper wrote: post #19

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...

I'm a Pinterest newbie, but do you have to be the owner of a board to pin to it? At least the boards I am following now it seems I cannot pin to them.

When you create a board you can decide whether only you or you and contributers can pin stuff on that board.

The contributors have to be manually added to the board though.

Re: A Pinterest spammer tells all

#72

Post by user2459 »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #7

There 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 spammers make their money because they can "fake out" the system to think they're the honest money-making folks.

None of this is any different than basic capitalism. Now this isn't an anti-capitalism rant, it's just an observation. Rite-Aide and Walmart can buy entire city blocks and run their businesses at a loss for years to fake out and overcome honest citizens' businesses and we celebrate their success.

I suspect if people could invest in spammers there'd be a different public perception of them.

Re: A Pinterest spammer tells all

#73

Post by blhack »

joshuahedlund wrote: post #11

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…

You'll always lose in an arms race that you didn't start.

If you start stripping affiliate IDs, I'll just write a redirector and link to that, or link to an existing redirector. Are you going to ban all of bit.ly? Or t.co? or letter.obscure_tld from your website?

Re: A Pinterest spammer tells all

#74

Post by joshu »

blhack wrote: post #73
joshuahedlund wrote: post #11

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…

You'll always lose in an arms race that you didn't start. If you start stripping affiliate IDs, I'll just write a redirector and link to that, or link to an existing redirector. Are you going to ban all of bit.ly? Or t.co? or letter.obscure_tld from your website?

We did ban URL shorteners on delicious.

It wasn't that hard to pick out URLs that were not user facing (that a bookmark let would never see)

Re: A Pinterest spammer tells all

#75

Post by codexon »

coderdude wrote: post #59
codexon wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No single heuristic is perfect. How about you tell us your 1 flawless method?

Just because I used 2 different signals to prove to you that the method doesn't generate a lot of false positives, doesn't mean that looking at amazon links is a bad method.

If I was at Pinterest, I would slap a captcha on all Amazon links with affiliates until I had time for a fancier solution, and it would probably get rid of 99% of the spam.

Re: A Pinterest spammer tells all

#76

Post by rokhayakebe »

true_religion wrote: post #67
rokhayakebe wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Don't you need an invite for that? If you have any handy, can you send one my way?

You do. I do not have an account yet, but I am already visiting the site a few times daily for refreshment. I plan on emailing info@piccsy and see if i can convince them to give me a few invites. Will def. share then.

EDIT: Email daniel at piccsy dot com. He's the founder.

Re: A Pinterest spammer tells all

#77

Post by siculars »

Let's say you are a "regular" user. You "pin" x number of pins/frequency (hr/day/whatever). This establishes a normal activity baseline. Filter by "pins" that have links that have affiliate codes in them. Now, it has been shown that Skimlinks can identify these links and replace them. If that is the case, they can count the number of affiliate unique id's in their system across pinterest accounts, thereby linking seemingly disparate accounts by their affiliate links. Unless this guy is running game with multiple affiliate links or affiliate links are uniquely generated on a per item basis then I think Pinterest can put a stop to this.

Re: A Pinterest spammer tells all

#80

Post by JDShu »

user2459 wrote: post #72
DanielBMarkham wrote: post #7

There 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 spammers make their money because they can "fake out" the system to think they're the honest money-making folks. None of this is any different than basic capitalism. Now this isn't an anti-capitalism rant, it's just an observation. Rite-Aide and Walmart can buy entire city blocks and run their businesses at a loss for years to fake out and overcome honest citizens ' businesses and we celebrate their success. I su…

For your Walmart example, wouldn't that violate section 2 of the Sherman Act? In principle, it isn't a strategy the United States government allows.
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