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Facebook has more than 83 million 'fake' users

bbc.com

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Re: Facebook has more than 83 million 'fake' users

#61

Post by Zimahl »

ghshephard wrote: post #56
veyron wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"an account that a user maintains in addition to his or her principal account." The problem there is that a person trying hard to keep personas separate can do so without Facebook being able to track (I assume they have to be more specific than just matching by IP address).

Re: Matching IP address - given the prevalence of NAT, in which several thousand users will be associated with a single IP address - you can't rely on that. Cookies, on the other hand, or, browser-fingerprint-matching, probably can be used to identify these shill accounts. I wonder if Facebook knows how many of it's accounts are fake, or if they actively avoid looking into that information.

Then again, while it is common for us 'computer folk' to have more than 1 computer, a lot of households have just 1 shared by many people. My sister's family has 1 shared computer with 3 Facebook users (soon to be 4 in a year or two).

Re: Facebook has more than 83 million 'fake' users

#62

Post by tatsuke95 »

muyuu wrote: post #25
tatsuke95 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How could they tell what is active? I mean really tell? It's difficult. Besides, the more accounts they can report as active, the more "reach" they can sell to advertisers, and the higher the prices advertisers have to pay for that space.

It's difficult with strong accuracy, with a 5% margin I don't think it's hard. Sure they can fake their reports, but they do know quite well how many active users they have.

Okay, agreed that it can be done with some margin of error. I think 5% is fair.

But if 1 out of 20 "fake" accounts that are active are closed down by mistake, that's millions of pissed off customers and customer support emails. In other words, a massive headache.

That's a problem.

Re: Facebook has more than 83 million 'fake' users

#63

Post by RandallBrown »

jps359 wrote: post #29
lusr wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their mobile iOS application is absolutely the worst application I have ever used on iOS. It just doesn't work far too often (it took 2 months for notifications to randomly start working on my new iPhone 4S, but activating them can't load the new content half the time or just sits there loading forever; I have no network issues with any other iOS applications) and irritates me too much (e.g. I keep getting stories fr…

This is my primary gripe with facebook. You'd think that they'd be able to develop a decent mobile app, being as large as it is. The google+ app works way way way better. So smooth and everything loads quickly as it should. Hell, even the tumblr app I use works better than the facebook one.

Their iPhone app used to work really well. Then, they tried to do some crazy cross platform shenanigans to keep the mobile website, iPhone, and Android versions on the same general codebase. That's when things really suffered and I've read articles saying they're ditching the cross platform stuff and going back to native. We'll see.

Re: Facebook has more than 83 million 'fake' users

#64

Post by bretkoppel »

jaredstenquist wrote: post #5

I can account for atleast 100 of those. Any company who relies heavily on Facebook for registration and auth likely creates many on a regular basis for testing.

I, too, have several accounts that either predate test users or predate my knowledge of them. Still easier to use them than the test accounts occasionally.

Re: Facebook has more than 83 million 'fake' users

#65

Post by what_ever »

lusr wrote: post #16
jgroome wrote: post #6

Been using Facebook every day since 2007. Recently though I've noticed my visits to the site drop to maybe once or twice per day, whereas at its peak I was checking it multiple times per hour. I think in their desire to work out what exactly makes them money, they've changed the way you're supposed to use the site. Where I used to see a news feed full of (mostly mundane but still interesting) status updates and photo…

Their mobile iOS application is absolutely the worst application I have ever used on iOS. It just doesn't work far too often (it took 2 months for notifications to randomly start working on my new iPhone 4S, but activating them can't load the new content half the time or just sits there loading forever; I have no network issues with any other iOS applications) and irritates me too much (e.g. I keep getting stories fr…

I had heard a couple of months ago that Facebook doesn't want to improve the native apps and instead Google and Apple to improve the html5 support in their respective browsers. Facebook wants to have a uniform experience across platforms and html5 site would be best way to achieve that. This explains why their apps are not customized as per the Android/iOS standards. They even formed a group to discuss the state of mobile browsers and Google and Apple have been ignoring it.

Re: Facebook has more than 83 million 'fake' users

#66

Post by SoftwareMaven »

caffeine5150 wrote: post #48
joshuahedlund wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had a similar experience and similar thoughts. I'm a strong believer in free markets, etc, but sometimes I don't understand the unending need for growth (i.e. why is it considered a bad thing that Facebook is so large that it doesn't have much room for growth?) If you're large and profitable, what's wrong with that? It often seems like the relentless pursuit for growth leads to short-term decisions to increase p…

I think its a fundamental flaw of the public company ecosystem. Management is driven to have a very short-term, myopic view of shareholder value (i.e. stock price quarter to quarter). This was made much worse by the rise in profile of analysts in the late 90's tech boom with increased focus on short term earnings guidance. Perhaps eventually Zuckerberg will be replaced by a more market-savvy CEO. Also being public wi…

But without those public markets, Facebook would never have gotten anywhere close to where they are today because there would have been no major investments.

Instead, we would likely have multiple, smaller networks that we have to pay for because they wouldn't be able to bootstrap to a level that advertising can cover. That would not necessarily be a worse world.

Re: Facebook has more than 83 million 'fake' users

#67

Post by tokenadult »

From the submitted article: "User-misclassified accounts amounted to 2.4% - including personal profiles for businesses or pets"

The dog owned by my niece in Taiwan has been on Facebook for more than a year. (I haven't bothered to friend the dog, but I keep up with my niece's news via Facebook.)

"Duplicate profiles - belonging to already registered users - made up 4.8% of its membership figure."

I have plenty of American friends (mostly married women with children) who use pseudonyms, and plenty of those have more than one Facebook account to distinguish personal friends from work colleagues.

"Last month, the BBC's technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones set up a fake company called VirtualBagel to investigate allegations of fake 'likes'."

The BBC investigation confirms what most of us regular Facebook users know from personal experience. A lot of what looks like user engagement on Facebook is just faking or fooling around, not something on which to build an estimate of future monetization of Facebook. I'm still not seeing how Facebook can do any better than AOL did at increasing monetization without driving down the satisfaction of users.

Re: Facebook has more than 83 million 'fake' users

#70

Post by eblume »

conradfr wrote: post #43
freehunter wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did an experiment a few years ago where I set up a profile for someone who supposedly went to my university. His pictures were pulled from the profile of a male model, the rest was all made up. I went through every profile I could get and sent friend requests. I actually hit the 5000 friends limit. Usually I would send a message saying "hey we met at X party last night!" if I could find that information on their pu…

Notbad.jpg The funny thing is that I NEVER asked anyone from my fish account and he now has friends from all over the world, while his name is "My fish Ploup" in French. About your fake account and its birthday wishes, An experiment could be to put a erroneous birthday date. I guess that day you can get a lot of wishes, even from close friends. We are just lazy I guess.

That's actually what got me to close my FB account. I was tired of getting emailed birthday spam because FB knew my birthday, so I changed it to April 1st and forgot about it. This April, I got about 10 or 20 'Happy Birthday!'s before I posted saying "It's not actually my birthday, April Fool's!" ... and then people kept posting happy birthday without noticing.

Wasn't worth keeping it around after that.

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