Facebook has more than 83 million 'fake' users • Hacker News Board

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

#11

Post by veyron » Thu, Aug 02, 2012, 11:51 AM UTC

swombat wrote: post #4

Worth noting that not all these "fakes" are bad, or even inactive or less active. For example, most performers on the Burlesque scene have accounts specifically for their Burlesque personas, with names like "Kitty Cupcake" or "Tabitha Taboo" and the like. These are obviously not their real names, but a consequence of the fact that Burlesque performers don't want the offline attention on their personal or professional…

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

#12

Post by Andrenid » Thu, Aug 02, 2012, 11:53 AM UTC

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…

My massive decline in use is directly correlated to how annoying they've made it to use.

Eg: You can't have your feed always sort by "Most Recent", it keeps defaulting to "Top Stories", keeping old/stagnant stories at the top of my feed just because they got a few comments, while not showing me the new stuff.

Also, the sheer amount of crap they shove in your face now. " Likes TOYOTA!" then a big post by Toyota shoved front and center of my feed, all because that friend Liked that page a few months back.

Also, the annoying way that you can't ignore just a certain type of post from friends (bar a few). You can set them to "Important Updates Only" but then you miss lots of posts you might find interesting. I want to ignore their Likes of memes/pictures but still get their posts of their own content, etc.

There's lots more reasons, but they've basically made the site a pain in the ass to use, so I find myself back to reading sites via RSS and chatting to people directly on Google Talk when I need some "social".

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

#13

Post by mmphosis » Thu, Aug 02, 2012, 11:54 AM UTC

I create a fake account everytime that I have a need to enter Facebook's walled garden.

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

#14

Post by human_error » Thu, Aug 02, 2012, 12:09 PM UTC

I believe the number is way higher than 83 million. I have 5 facebook accounts that I use most of them for testing apps.

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

#15

Post by lusr » Thu, Aug 02, 2012, 12:10 PM UTC

swombat wrote: post #4

Worth noting that not all these "fakes" are bad, or even inactive or less active. For example, most performers on the Burlesque scene have accounts specifically for their Burlesque personas, with names like "Kitty Cupcake" or "Tabitha Taboo" and the like. These are obviously not their real names, but a consequence of the fact that Burlesque performers don't want the offline attention on their personal or professional…

My ex-girlfriend used a second Facebook profile to earn rewards in the *ville games (or something, I have no idea how those games work). Truly fake secondary accounts like that are probably quite common given the popularity of those games. All of this just demonstrates that using "monthly active users" as a metric is meaningless and Facebook need better and more well thought out metrics.

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

#16

Post by lusr » Thu, Aug 02, 2012, 12:16 PM UTC

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 from pages I hid on the desktop site, you can't manage photos properly like on the desktop site, etc.).

I've reverted to using the desktop site under mobile Safari but I'm dying for somebody to replace Facebook simply with something of higher quality - I don't mind the ads or tracking and I genuinely find it a useful site, it's just of such poor quality it's annoying!

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

#17

Post by taligent » Thu, Aug 02, 2012, 12:17 PM UTC

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…

I wonder if Facebook actually analyses the uploaded content to determine its meaning. So if you did start to hide more and more comics whether it would be able to automatically do that irrespective of which friend uploaded it.

That said it is a bit strange that you would seek to blame Facebook when clearly it is a problem with your friends. I for example never receive any 4chan content.

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

#18

Post by muyuu » Thu, Aug 02, 2012, 12:19 PM UTC

I thought FB did most of its stats on "active" accounts? Surely there are many millions of abandoned and testing accounts.

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

#19

Post by tatsuke95 » Thu, Aug 02, 2012, 12:24 PM UTC

swombat wrote: post #4

Worth noting that not all these "fakes" are bad, or even inactive or less active. For example, most performers on the Burlesque scene have accounts specifically for their Burlesque personas, with names like "Kitty Cupcake" or "Tabitha Taboo" and the like. These are obviously not their real names, but a consequence of the fact that Burlesque performers don't want the offline attention on their personal or professional…

>"These are very legitimate use of a social networking platform."

I have many friends (not strippers, unfortunately) who are active on the site with completely fraudulent personal information.

The problem isn't that the accounts are inactive. The problem is that businesses are buying ad-space based on the data produced by these "fake" accounts. When my 30 year-old female friends from Canada are generating data as 65 year old, married men from Wisconsin, someone trying to advertise to those men is going to get a raw deal.

>"It would be a mistake for Facebook to target such accounts and close them down."

Facebook won't close them down, both for the reasons you mention (these are real, active users) as well the fact that it's important for them to be able to boast about user figures. If the published number is 83MM, my bet is the reality is higher.

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

#20

Post by tatsuke95 » Thu, Aug 02, 2012, 12:27 PM UTC

lusr wrote: post #15

swombat wrote: post #4

Worth noting that not all these "fakes" are bad, or even inactive or less active. For example, most performers on the Burlesque scene have accounts specifically for their Burlesque personas, with names like "Kitty Cupcake" or "Tabitha Taboo" and the like. These are obviously not their real names, but a consequence of the fact that Burlesque performers don't want the offline attention on their personal or professional…

My ex-girlfriend used a second Facebook profile to earn rewards in the *ville games (or something, I have no idea how those games work). Truly fake secondary accounts like that are probably quite common given the popularity of those games. All of this just demonstrates that using "monthly active users" as a metric is meaningless and Facebook need better and more well thought out metrics.

This is a huge problem I've harped on before, that will get worse in the future. We've all seen Zynga get buried the past few weeks; what happens when large flows of people stop playing these games? It's much harder for the people still playing to achieve some of the "Ask 10 friends!" objectives that are so prevalent.

How is that solved? By making more fake accounts.