Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Facebook Fraud [video]

youtube.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 412 posts

Re: Facebook Fraud [video]

#151

Post by voyou »

kzrdude wrote: post #5

Be sure to watch through to the end for the conclusion! I'll summarise: Click farms like every page they can, far more than just the pages they were paid to like; the theory is that they will evade detection this way. Paying for "legitimate" facebook exposure will expose you to the click farms as well, and that will be the absolute majority of your gained likes. In this way facebook ads give a huge, but useless, gain…

"Paying for "legitimate" facebook exposure will expose you to the click farms as well, and that will be the absolute majority of your gained likes."

Does that matter? I mean, obviously if you're trying to work out whether it's worth paying for Facebook ads, it's worth being aware that a large number of Likes isn't necessarily a sign of a successful ad, but you don't know the "value" of a Like in advance anyway. If you discover that every 1,000 Likes you get 10 more sales (or whatever), then you can work out whether it's worth spending money for an ad that will likely bring in 1,000 Likes, whether 990 of those likes are "genuine" Likes that don't turn into sales, or 990 of the Likes are click farm Likes.

I mean, I've never advertised on Facebook, I don't know anything about it, but I would have thought you need to measure the actual effectiveness of your ads; whether click farm fake Likes are contributing to this overall effectiveness or not doesn't seem relevant to the end result.

Re: Facebook Fraud [video]

#152

Post by bencollier49 »

mullingitover wrote: post #21

I found a way to dramatically improve facebook. Around the beginning of the year I unfollowed every single friend and page, so my newsfeed is completely empty. Now when I want to know what my friends are up to, I go check out their pages, essentially going from a push feed to a pull. It gets me out of the empty crack addiction-esque cycle of going to the news feed and being disappointed/bored with the lives of my fri…

Hmm, Facebook seems to randomly refollow people on my behalf when I try this. Perhaps it's latency or something?

Re: Facebook Fraud [video]

#153

Post by mullingitover »

Loughla wrote: post #138
baby wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really wish I could do that. I used to ask a friend to change my password, now I use www.offsocialnetwork.com to do it (I'm doing it this week). But I can't go really long without facebook since all is planned from there, the parties, the social events, the foreign friends visiting my city, foreign friends keeping in touch with me... I guess it's easier not to have facebook when you didn't travel a lot and don't ha…

"But I can't go really long without facebook since all is planned from there, the parties, the social events, the foreign friends visiting my city, foreign friends keeping in touch with me..." I have two questions to respond to this - how did people do all of these things before the facebook platform? What is stopping you from doing these same things? I find it fascinating that people treat websites like facebook lik…

> I have two questions to respond to this - how did people do all of these things before the facebook platform? What is stopping you from doing these same things?

1) They used other services (e.g. Evite) which had the same effect 2) Nobody uses those other services anymore (okay, I got one evite from the one friend who refused to use facebook...and then somebody created the event page on facebook and all the party planning promptly got hijacked and moved there)

So your choices are to use Facebook and get invited to parties, or be like that guy from ten years ago who refused to get an email address and was butthurt that nobody would pick up the phone to personally invite him to the party.

Re: Facebook Fraud [video]

#154

Post by joeblau »

mullingitover wrote: post #21

I found a way to dramatically improve facebook. Around the beginning of the year I unfollowed every single friend and page, so my newsfeed is completely empty. Now when I want to know what my friends are up to, I go check out their pages, essentially going from a push feed to a pull. It gets me out of the empty crack addiction-esque cycle of going to the news feed and being disappointed/bored with the lives of my fri…

Yeah i did the Facebook 300 Diet #FB300D 2 years ago and it was amazing. Basically, I unfriended all but 300 people and my feed got much better. I even created a word document that details who you should unfriend.

Re: Facebook Fraud [video]

#155

Post by VladRussian2 »

dudus wrote: post #102
shawn-furyan wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Startups generally have a bias towards doing things that they can measure accurately. As far as biases go, preferring to pay for things that have a demonstrable effect is a pretty good one, especially for startups that generally don't have the resources to waste on a large number of failed initiatives. Sure if you have some incite that gives you a better than normal chance of getting a very high ROI on a creative in…

I agree that investing on these may seem more profitable in the short term. But branding is a long term goal. Even for Startups branding is important, this can be crucial to close the next deals with VCs or acquiring users' hearts. Digital Ocean is a good example, I've read good and bad stories, mostly good and they had an extensive Youtube and Display Campaigns. When it was finally time for me to close a deal with a…

>Companies spend millions in SuperBowl ads, and nobody can click on that,

not that i dream about clicking it, i'm just surprised that they still hasn't implemented it yet as current TVs are really computers sold/packaged as TVs.

Re: Facebook Fraud [video]

#156

Post by at-fates-hands »

It's interesting this is still making the rounds. Back in 2010 I remember seeing articles talking about how their ad services was a total Ponzi scheme. Nice to know not much has changed. At the time I was thinking about investing some pretty large amounts of money into advertising on FB. In hindsight, I'm really glad I didn't.

http://www.jperla.com/blog/post/facebook-is-a-ponzi-scheme

Re: Facebook Fraud [video]

#157

Post by [deleted] »

kevando wrote: post #147
Houshalter wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not necessarily. If content from your friends and family and other pages you enjoy is regularly filtered out and replaced with paid "promoted" posts, it decreases the quality of the site.

And from there, you have the fallacy of this argument. This decreases the quality of your experience on Facebook. With the million other options and networks, why on earth would Facebook purposefully lower the quality of their product in order to make a few bucks with ads?

[deleted]

Re: Facebook Fraud [video]

#158

Post by commandar »

kevando wrote: post #149
commandar wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From a user perspective, I like things because I want to see content. It annoys me to no end that I know I'm missing out on updates from sources I care about because Facebook selectively decides what to show me, and effectively holds my attention hostage.

This is the argument I find confusing...You ask Facebook to curate your news feed and then get upset when they curate it.

Where am I asking Facebook to curate (in this case, read: cull) from posts that I've indicated that I want to see?

I'm asking to see posts from something I've explicitly stated an interest in; I'm not asking them to pick and choose a subset that I get to see beyond that.

Re: Facebook Fraud [video]

#159

Post by alex_doom »

mullingitover wrote: post #21

I found a way to dramatically improve facebook. Around the beginning of the year I unfollowed every single friend and page, so my newsfeed is completely empty. Now when I want to know what my friends are up to, I go check out their pages, essentially going from a push feed to a pull. It gets me out of the empty crack addiction-esque cycle of going to the news feed and being disappointed/bored with the lives of my fri…

Exactly, event planning/tracking is the only reason I stay on.

Re: Facebook Fraud [video]

#160

Post by chaz »

I thought I read a comment here that thought that there was a cultural difference as well. The author mentioned that a couple of distant friends in some countries who would Like every one of his posts, no matter what it was about.

Regardless, the need to drive up page fans is probably over, as the value of a fan/Like was always questionable. Target your actual customer base and pay for clicks that matter. Facebook seems to still be a great place for performance-based display advertising.

Post reply on HN