I have a 'fake' account.
It's used purely for logging into Spotify, as there is no other way to get a Spotify account.
Facebook has more than 83 million 'fake' users
21–30 of 96 posts
Re: Facebook has more than 83 million 'fake' users
#22Been 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…
-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 is actually a setting for this - You need to "Unsubscribe from comments and likes by ___"
I worked vigilantly at this over a few weeks and eventually my feed went back to what it used to look like circa 2008. Then, sadly, a few weeks ago, they were all back one day out of the blue. Since then, the unsubscribe functionality has been straight-up broken.
https://www.facebook.com/help/community/question/?id=2297060 https://www.facebook.com/help/community/question/?id=2300268
Re: Facebook has more than 83 million 'fake' users
#23I thought FB did most of its stats on "active" accounts? Surely there are many millions of abandoned and testing accounts.
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.
Re: Facebook has more than 83 million 'fake' users
#24Whist we're at it I'd love to see the stats for twitter. How many of their users are actually active? Or those active users how many are real people an not bots?
Re: Facebook has more than 83 million 'fake' users
#25I thought FB did most of its stats on "active" accounts? Surely there are many millions of abandoned and testing accounts.
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.
Re: Facebook has more than 83 million 'fake' users
#26Whist we're at it I'd love to see the stats for twitter. How many of their users are actually active? Or those active users how many are real people an not bots?
I have not used my Twitter account for over two years, yet it gathers about 3-4 new followers a week so there's a significant amount of pointless activity created by automated processes that just follow people based on keywords - or maybe there's a lot of people who like my extended period of thoughful silence.
Re: Facebook has more than 83 million 'fake' users
#27Whist we're at it I'd love to see the stats for twitter. How many of their users are actually active? Or those active users how many are real people an not bots?
I have not used my Twitter account for over two years, yet it gathers about 3-4 new followers a week so there's a significant amount of pointless activity created by automated processes that just follow people based on keywords - or maybe there's a lot of people who like my extended period of thoughful silence.
The spam followers I pick up seem to target lists of “followers of X”, where X is marginally topical to their spam.
Re: Facebook has more than 83 million 'fake' users
#28Worth 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…
Also, my two fake users have uncovered more Facebook platform bugs than the vast majority of real users.
Re: Facebook has more than 83 million 'fake' users
#29Been 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…
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.
Re: Facebook has more than 83 million 'fake' users
#30on http://getairmail.com (shameless plug) the facebook and twitter email servers are very popular when looking at incoming mail domains. Some accounts create dozens of fake accounts in a single session.