I own 10K bots, each one post 10 pins daily, 1 random pic + 9 good pics. 9 over 1 makes the pin quality above average. Everyday I choose 10K pics for every bot to pin as random pic. The 100 pics get most clicks become good pics in the next day. I call my bots collaborative content election system, but not spamfarm.
A Pinterest spammer tells all
111–118 of 118 posts
Re: A Pinterest spammer tells all
#112In life there are often short-term gains that can be made by someone either lacking in principle or who simply fails to exercise it. In simple terms, in this world there are always going to be temptations to travel down a road that in the end leads to death. In this case, it is eventual financial death for the marketer.
I know the temptation is for this road to be traveled because it's most often the easier road in the short-run for someone to take. There is no doubt in marketing a product or service that you are going to have to knock on many doors. Most often this will mean having to spend money in the process of running ads in order to get the word out. Bots such as those used by the Pinterest spammer automate the process but do so by taking advantage of loop-holes in the system and in so doing exploit whatever platform they are using (in this case Pinterest).
It is one thing to offer a product or service and to let people know about it and quite another to use technology to exploit a Platform for the purpose of sending unsolicited information to those who you do not know. There are better ways to market products and to profit from the sale of them through proven, sound marketing strategies.
The use of spam bots are not a reflection of anyone who has pursued an education of good marketing techniques. Such people only serve to give marketers in general a bad name. Those who pursue get rich quick strategies like this are not they type of people that endure for the long-run.
Re: A Pinterest spammer tells all
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
There's a better way. Make a crawler that follows your redirects. If it hits an affiliate page, you can presume (with some likelihood) that it's a spam link. If you put in intermediate redirects that the crawler wouldn't pick up, there's a chance your targets won't either and you'll lose customers.
The crawler better be undetectable as such. For instance, it better send "expected" headers (User Agent, Accepts, etc.), and it better have cookies enabled, and also operate from many distinct and perpetually changing IP addresses.
Otherwise, the spammer will be able to run his/her own URL shortener service in a 5USD/month VPS and be able to show a spammy link to the users and a regular-looking link for the crawler.
BTW: a "crawler" implemented with Mechanical Turk workers would be a little bit harder to detect, but would also have its downsides.
Re: A Pinterest spammer tells all
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a better way. Make a crawler that follows your redirects. If it hits an affiliate page, you can presume (with some likelihood) that it's a spam link. If you put in intermediate redirects that the crawler wouldn't pick up, there's a chance your targets won't either and you'll lose customers.
The crawler better be undetectable as such. For instance, it better send "expected" headers (User Agent, Accepts, etc.), and it better have cookies enabled, and also operate from many distinct and perpetually changing IP addresses. Otherwise, the spammer will be able to run his/her own URL shortener service in a 5USD/month VPS and be able to show a spammy link to the users and a regular-looking link for the crawler.…
"For instance, it better send "expected" headers (User Agent, Accepts, etc.), and it better have cookies enabled..."
How are these challenges exactly? Just set the user-agent and enable cookies. Done.
"...also operate from many distinct and perpetually changing IP addresses."
Okay. Change the IP it operates on every few days.
Re: A Pinterest spammer tells all
#115There 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…
> None of this is any different than basic capitalism.
Completely agree. I'm not sure I see anything wrong with what the spammer is doing. He may be polluting the Pinterest 'stream' with affiliate links, but it's not like the people on Pinterest aren't on there just to look at random stuff they may never see anyways. Obviously he must be showing people stuff they want if he's making money on it.
It shouldn't even be called spam since every link on Pinterest is technically solicited. Every user on there wants to see new stuff, that's the point of the site. It's nothing like email spam that I didn't ask for, or junk mail that was sent to my house just because they grabbed my info from somewhere.
Re: A Pinterest spammer tells all
#116Everywhere I go, I find a spammer has been there before me.
Re: A Pinterest spammer tells all
#117Where can I get one of these bots? This seems too good to be true!
Here's where you can find it > http://bit.ly/GZd7I1
Re: A Pinterest spammer tells all
#118Earlier 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.
What ruined the product for you? In what way is it too crowded? (I am not affiliated with Pinterest. Just curious from a product perspective.)
That is it. I loved it, I still like it, but with scale comes inevitable problems. Another reason is that I like something niche. At 13M users, it's mainstream and not for me.