241–250 of 381 posts
But not one of them actually used the service (Which involved typing a query into a search box).
This bot nonsense kinda makes me wonder if those 300 click throughs were really people.
I wish their post was a bit more technical. Show us the code you used to detect javascript, how did the analytics work? Did they test their code by using their own browser to click an ad and see if the code detected javascript, or their hit in the analytic software? More technical info and data would be nice!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And then there are the "wet bots" - Amazon Turks and overseas humans (lowly) paid to use a regular browser and PC and manually click on stuff for whatever purpose (rig internet voting, drive fake advertising charges, steal data, skew hit counters - whatever).
Is an impression from a mechanical turk not a true impression? Its a real person, after all. If the premise of marketing and advertising work due to mere exposure, then intent of the view shouldn't be measured. What you are getting at however is very important to ad-driven internet business models. You make the empathetical deduction that if you are there for one purpose, you are impervious to advertising. Now, if yo…
Advertising and marketing are generally very intentionally tailored. You're not trying to reach any human, you're trying to reach a human in your target demographic.
Skewing results (and wasting resources) by paying people who are entirely outside your marketing effort to click through links (or take other similar resource-costing / data-skewing actions) is not the desired result.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Surprised no ones mentioned the noscript plugin. Since the user is on facebook they'd have facebook unblocked, but noscript still blocking everything else. How would you discern a noscript user from bot?
You don't, but it's very unlikely that there were enough noscript users to match the stats. From the post: "...in all of our years of experience, only about 1-2% of people coming to us have JavaScript disabled, not 80% like these clicks coming from Facebook."
For example, target something for the Reddit.com users and you'll see 90%+ block ads.
With facebook granular targetting you could very specifically end up with a target segment with a large proportion of noscript type plugin users. Without more details on their campaign I would not be so quick to place blame purely on bots.
Copying the text just incase FB decides they don't like it --- Hey everyone, we're going to be deleting our Facebook page in the next couple of weeks, but we wanted to explain why before we do. A couple months ago, when we were preparing to launch the new Limited Run, we started to experiment with Facebook ads. Unfortunately, while testing their ad system, we noticed some very strange things. Facebook was charging us…
We built a page logger. Any time a page was loaded, we'd keep track of it. They reinvented the access log? By hand? Are people really that detached from how servers work?
I am not familiar with how things work on FaceBook, but I would think that FaceBook users do not have access to the logs that FaceBook's servers write.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
using awk.
Hey now, awk is simply lovely. It's ridiculous how popular it is to slight it these days.
It was the proper add-on to the previous comment kids today don't learn awk. Becuase they have Perl, Ruby, and Python which are supersets of the unix command line tool set. Awk was the king in the years before Perl.
I never really learned to use cut, so I sitll use awk for one-liners the deal with columns in delimited-data text-files.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I understand that it is challenging for a third party like you to identify the bots. But Facebook has more than enough signal on each user clicking on an ad (friends, posts, location, 'non ad-click activity' to 'ad-click activity' ratio) to determine if that user is a bot. Looks like they are choosing to not do anything with this information. "FB is turning a blind eye to keep their revenue" seems to stand up to Occa…
Couldn't agree more. It should be almost trivial for them to track down bots and flag bad accounts. I definitely wouldn't classify it as one of their harder problems.
Too often I've heard "how could XYZ not have done this, fixed that?" Then have that same party sign on board to fix this "easy" problem and get themselves in a world of hurt.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hey now, awk is simply lovely. It's ridiculous how popular it is to slight it these days.
How does 'using awk' count as a slight? It was the proper add-on to the previous comment kids today don't learn awk. Becuase they have Perl, Ruby, and Python which are supersets of the unix command line tool set. Awk was the king in the years before Perl. I never really learned to use cut, so I sitll use awk for one-liners the deal with columns in delimited-data text-files.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You think I make this shit up? There are some really naive and stupid people on HN that have zero grasp on the history of intelligence agencies.
So, this is why people don't take you seriously. I know a couple of guys like you in my local activist community, who take a very hostile "I know the truth and you're all fools!" attitude, despite the fact that their audience is mostly very sympathetic to most of their assertions. We know spying on the Internet takes place; HN is full of cantankerous old Internet geeks who've seen, first-hand, plenty of examples of t…
Really, now I am a paranoid schizophrenic?
Just because I make claims which are readily confirmed and were completely available in the media - even the EFF filed suit on the AT&T events...
Yet, for some reason, it is my responsibility to educate everyone every single time someone new comes along who hasn't been following these things closely.
Now I am a paranoid schizophrenic?
Also, its a strawman to focus on my tone, rather than content. You're trying really hard to be overly pedantic and, frankly, an asshole.
Thanks for the link on communication.