If you're a street musician setting up to play with an open instrument case, it's pretty important to "seed the pot" by throwing a few dollars and some change into the case. Not because you make any money from your own "donation", but because it shows passers-by what the arrangement is, and adds an element of social pressure ("Somebody donated, so I should too!").
I can see this as similar. There's something pathetic about being the first Twitter follower, or the 6th "Like", and something scary, particularly for a local business, about vouching for something you're not really 100% sure on. Writing the 4th 5 star review is a lot easier than the 1st one, and it's easy, and more anonymous, to be the 45th Like.
I don't support these services, and think we need good heuristics to stop them, but I can totally see why even an early influx of a few fake followers and reviews would "seed the pot", and be worth way more to a business's eventual health than $20-40.
> If you're a street musician setting up to play with an open instrument case, it's pretty important to "seed the pot"
This concept is discussed at length, and backed up with scientific studies, in the excellent book Influence, by Robert Cialdini, PhD. This particular concept he calls "Social Proof", and it's one of about 8 major categories of influence that he discusses in his book.
Incidentally, dropping the PhD on the end of his name is another one of the forms of influence. While reading the book, I couldn't help but get tons of ideas for a marketing campaign involving social proof. The concept is of course much broader than seeding donation hats. In the book he even gets into the elements of how the Jim Jones tragedy went down, and social proof is at the core of it.
I tried this with a blog I used to run. Back when RSS subsriber count actually mattered, I faked the subscribe button to show that I had 15,984 subscribers instead of 134.
I would get just 1 subscriber every day earlier. After the change, I started getting 3 a day with the same traffic.
Excellent observation regarding the street musician (busker) faring better with a little grease visible to potential audience / donors!
I'd like to point out that the music industry has long been a bastion of other techniques as well, some more underhanded than others, depending on one's moral compass. The notion of Payola is still alive and well, and has changed with the new music and marketing avenues. I'm not in a position to name specifics, but there's word of payment for review / features, which seems the most blatant. Personally I can attest to navigating all sorts of sketchy "Promote through us!" type operations that may or may not be doing legit advertising...
Getting a network of Twitter or Soundcloud followers - or appearing to have one - is a pretty standard objective, which I guess why there exist services or short-cuts to those ends.
It's the same thing as posting a "tear off this phone number" page on a bulletin board. You always tear off a tab or two when you first post it, to make it look like people have shown interest.
I used to go to a cafe where they often had a $20 bill in the tip jar near the cash register. I always felt like that bill hadn't been left by a customer...
But you also could do an extra effort to impress a small number of customers and ask for reviews personally. Buy fake reviews is not the only option here.
"Facebook says it uses pattern recognition to find and eliminate click farms and accounts that exist solely to like pages. Since March, says Facebook, it’s “notified 200,000 Pages that we’ve protected their accounts from fake likes.” I love the way they put this: “Protected,” as if the companies hadn’t paid for them."
This may be more accurate than the author of this article believes. I've read elsewhere that precisely because FB is using pattern recognition to combat this, the cleverest of the fake accounts spend a certain amount of their time doing random/normal stuff to avoid detection. And this includes liking random businesses. And one of the problems is that if a legitimate business pays FB to promote one of their posts (so it is shown to a bigger percentage of their followers), then the more fake followers they have, the more real money they are wasting to advertise to bots. So if a business is actually using FB to engage with their userbase, then the fake likes are in fact detrimental to them.
Not just a problem if you spend money promoting to unwanted fake likes - EdgeRank decides who sees your un-promoted content based in part upon your average engagement levels, if half of your fans never engage because they are fake then your stats look worse to Facebook and so your content will be seen by a lower proportion of your real fans, even before you start spending $ promoting stuff.
Facebook is a mess and, to some extent, a huge scam. I spent tens of thousands of dollars advertising on Facebook to build-up an audience for a page for a business we were spinning up. We used very narrow criteria to guide the advertising and, over time, got tons of likes to our page.
And then it happened. FB changed the percentage of people you can reach with posts to your own page. In some cases you are lucky to get 1%. Of course, they also added the ability to reach them through advertising. Which is a travesty. I paid plenty to get them to my page in the first place and now FB wants me to pay again and again every single time I want to say something to them. Fuck them.
I know of lots of people who spent a lot more than I ever have on FB who have abandoned the platform for marketing. One guy was doing a million dollars a month with them. Gone. He brought-up exactly the same issue I describe above. So, yeah, again, fuck them. Thankfully there are other ways to reach people on the 'net.
I would like to add that if they would punish the businesses, this could of course be abused: if I have to pay $50 to have my competitor have serious spam issues with Facebook, possibly resulting in a penalty, that is some serious damage I could do.
"Protected" might be more accurate than you think initially. One of the first things that happens when blackhat SEO experts discover a "penalty" mechanism, is they will attempt to invoke it upon their competition.
Google deals with this re:bad links. Once they started penalizing, it became a new tactic to suppress competition.
We did a Facebook page for an university project, and created a small campaign for it (we were trying to do landing-page style validation).
It got a lot of "likes" which looked a lot like fake accounts trying to look less suspicious, and none of them converted to the landing page, they were just clicking "like".
> And one of the problems is that if a legitimate business pays FB to promote one of their posts
The same applies to non-paid content. Facebook will only expose your content to a portion of your users, obviously the more fake users you have the fewer real people you'll reach. Engagement levels have shown to decrease when adding fake users in previous experiments.
Yelp was the only company that caught us, hiding both of the reviews I bought behind their “not recommended” click wall and not counting them in F.A.K.E.’s rating. It has software that screens out suspicious reviews, not including them in a company’s star-rating. If they see too many of them, they will penalize a business’s page, putting a “consumer alert” on the profile for 90 days warning visitors that they think the business is buying fake reviews. People on Fiverr who were selling reviews would often say “No Yelp” in their descriptions, saying it was hard to make those “stick.”
This is why Yelp almost never disappoints. Kudos to the Yelp team for keeping the quality control strong and providing a great service.
I draw the exact opposite conclusion: Yelp is selling reviews and need to control their product. Twitter and Facebook aren't selling followers or friends, so they fight fakes... but not too hard, because that isn't their product.
Isn't the conventional wisdom that Yelp is a protection racket?
TLDR: YELP salespeople keep spamming you with phone calls, Louis was getting tired of it, but still polite (I would simply tell them to eat duck), so pointed out his friends business two blocks over pays $5K every month and seeing his books there was zero effect. What does Yelp salesperson do? She emails him PRIVATE INFORMATION OF COMPETING business :o.
American writers and journalists are always doing this. Do they really not know it makes the text unintelligible?
Even googling "A Lincoln" or "Lincoln" doesn't make it clear what they're trying to say, or how it applies.
When I read that I initially thought they meant the car company (Lincoln Motor Company), therefore I thought they were trying to say "if you spend car's worth of money you get <this>" except when you read on it is clear they didn't get enough value for that to make sense.
The short is: If you're a professional writer, blogger, journalist, or whatever and have an international audience, just stop it.
There's a whole seedy world under the surface of Fiverr, and I'm surprised no one seems to have done an in-depth "Inside Fiverr" piece yet. Vectorization services that present as individuals in the US but are actually farmed out to workshops in non-English speaking countries. Voice actors whose work samples consist mainly of dubious get-rich-quick ads. And as this article points out, "SEO" and "reputation building" services as far as the eye can see. (For $5, you can have your yoga "article" featured on this woman's website, complete with up to "three... dofollow links": https://www.fiverr.com/maigent/post-your-content-on-my-yoga-...)
The thing about that hoax, is that they put together a massive PR and ad campaign, with billboards and other media ads. That's not quite the same as doing everything for a couple hundred bucks.
That was a good write-up. Thing is, this works. Even (or especially) for startups. Only if to kickstart the hype a bit. Real followers and likes will follow, but let's be honest here: Who doesn't automatically trust a business that has 19K Twitter followers and a few good reviews out there?
From the article: And these days, which is more real: a fake business with a real website or a brick and mortar business with no online presence?
This site brought up at lease two separate overlay popups while attempting to read it. I don't usually complain about this, but that's totally obnoxious and meant I didn't finish reading the article.
Is there a good method to block this aggressively user-unfriendly bullshit?
But who, in this day and age, would trust or hire a new online business that had a page with 0-100 likes? The apparent presumption on seeing under 1k likes or under a few thousand twitter followers is the business is defective. Or forgotten, or no good. The incorrect wisdom of the crowd is that a legit business has a certain number of likes, followers etc, or it looks suspicious
For a new local business who is never going to get a HN or /. effect, or get some "viral buzz" from the cool kids, buying a few thousand can be a way to get to perceived neutrality. Enough likes or followers that they're no longer clicked away from for being "suspiciously" unloved.
Fake reviews on the other hand are much more directly fraudulent. Mind I'm surprised anyone at all still trusts online reviews, apart from negative ones!
As someone who does not use Facebook or Twitter, I don't give a hoot about how many "likes" or "followers" a business has, any more than I believe in any other marketing campaign. These measurements measure nothing meaningful to me as a potential customer, as this article clearly demonstrates. I've always found it baffling that people even remotely believe online "reviews" written by strangers.
I'll turn it around: Who is stupid enough to think, "Wow, this business's carefully curated Facebook marketing page has 10,000 likes.. That must mean they are truly reputable!"
I'm very aware of this problem. I set up Sitetruth.com to try to combat it. Here's what Sitetruth has on Launchrock.[1] Is there an street address on the web site? No. Anything we can tie to a list of US businesses? No. Better Business Bureau link? No. SEC filings? No. Rating: Do Not Enter. SiteTruth takes the position, "when in doubt, rate it down".
We'd use D&B data if it wasn't so expensive; this is just the demo version. There's a whole industry out there tracking business info, and the search industry isn't plugged into it. (Why? Google gets about a third of its revenue from AdSense ads on other sites. If Google really cracked down on clickbait sites, Google's own revenue would drop. We once calculated it would drop 14-17%.)
Back in 2011, I wrote "Social is bad for search, and search is bad for social".[2] That's when Google had started using social signals for search ranking, and the black-hat SEO industry had discovered how easy it was to manipulate Google via social. Old-style link farming, setting up lots of fake web sites to create links, is expensive, with servers to run and sites to fill. With social spamming, the social network hosts the spam for you, for free! You can still buy "bulk likes" for Facebook.[3][4] The price has gone up a little, indicating that Facebook is having some success in getting rid of fake accounts, but not much.
I really like this idea, but it seems fairly punishing for new / all remote / self-funded businesses. If you're running a company out of your own pocket (no SEC filings), aren't anywhere near big or old enough to have a BBB entry, and are remote (what street address should someone use? their apartment?) I'd like to know what signals you'd recommend bootstrappers use to engender trust for a service like yours, because I don't think "person is known on HN, posts on medium / Twitter about their service" is necessarily amenable to automated analysis.
I have been on Fiverr for few weeks and ordered two articles for $5 from some guy claiming from the US. The result was hilarious; a kindergarten kid can use much better grammar.
Also found some gigs encouraging piracy, found a guy who claims to give 3 ebooks ( you name it) for $5 ?!
You really shouldn't expect anything better for an article that pays the writer just $4 (after Fiverr takes its cut).
Good writing isn't something everyone can do. It takes me at least an hour to write around 500 words. A full 2k word post can take 6+ hours (since longer posts tend to be more complicated).
If I was charging Fiverr rates, I would end up making $4/hour.
I created an extension which I published in the Chrome store. I did notice a curious statistics with another similar purpose extension, which is also quite popular -- both are over 1 million users:
The ratings-per-user ratio for the other extension is almost 5 times that of my extension.[1]
I can't figure any other convincing explanation for this other than the other extension is buying ratings. If there is an alternative explanation I would like to hear it, but I can't think of one -- five times is way beyond one would expect IMO.
I actually don't know whether to be annoyed/dismayed or impressed. There's something really quite accomplished about this bizarre, entirely abstract, virtual enterprise.
"My sudden surge in popularity raised no flags at Twitter headquarters as far as I could tell, even though many of the followers had egg avatars who hadn’t tweeted in years."
I'm not sure that Twitter could use how often you tweet as a metric. I haven't tweeted anything in years either but I still use the service to see what my favourite people are saying. I'm sure there are plenty of lurkers like me.
How can we be sure that this article isn't a deep-cover "fake review" for Yelp? It tells a convincing story and manages to throw in Yelp's huge music selection - I mean, its effectiveness at removing fake reviews.
This is particularly bad in the moving industry. Not only are movers notorious for bribing customers to post good reviews but there are also several well ranking "Moving Specific" review sites that are completely fake. The industry also happens to have some of the most horrific scams...
In France, an agency created a fake company selling kebap sandwich on Mars. They had 105.000 views on their video, 46k followers, 20k facebook fans...and orders.
What's scary isn't the fact people buy fake reviews/followers/etc. but the fact people actually believe in these vanity metrics and want to order afterwards.
[+] [-] wanderfowl|10 years ago|reply
I can see this as similar. There's something pathetic about being the first Twitter follower, or the 6th "Like", and something scary, particularly for a local business, about vouching for something you're not really 100% sure on. Writing the 4th 5 star review is a lot easier than the 1st one, and it's easy, and more anonymous, to be the 45th Like.
I don't support these services, and think we need good heuristics to stop them, but I can totally see why even an early influx of a few fake followers and reviews would "seed the pot", and be worth way more to a business's eventual health than $20-40.
[+] [-] unoti|10 years ago|reply
This concept is discussed at length, and backed up with scientific studies, in the excellent book Influence, by Robert Cialdini, PhD. This particular concept he calls "Social Proof", and it's one of about 8 major categories of influence that he discusses in his book.
Incidentally, dropping the PhD on the end of his name is another one of the forms of influence. While reading the book, I couldn't help but get tons of ideas for a marketing campaign involving social proof. The concept is of course much broader than seeding donation hats. In the book he even gets into the elements of how the Jim Jones tragedy went down, and social proof is at the core of it.
Here is a video of the author outlining the major categories of influence. http://youtu.be/HOypv1AqYu0
[+] [-] puranjay|10 years ago|reply
I would get just 1 subscriber every day earlier. After the change, I started getting 3 a day with the same traffic.
[+] [-] 6stringmerc|10 years ago|reply
I'd like to point out that the music industry has long been a bastion of other techniques as well, some more underhanded than others, depending on one's moral compass. The notion of Payola is still alive and well, and has changed with the new music and marketing avenues. I'm not in a position to name specifics, but there's word of payment for review / features, which seems the most blatant. Personally I can attest to navigating all sorts of sketchy "Promote through us!" type operations that may or may not be doing legit advertising...
Getting a network of Twitter or Soundcloud followers - or appearing to have one - is a pretty standard objective, which I guess why there exist services or short-cuts to those ends.
[+] [-] pyre|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dethstar|10 years ago|reply
"Nobody has donated, have some compassion" works for some.
[+] [-] oalders|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] barking|10 years ago|reply
For example if you search for 'learn java', there's a total joke of a book at the top with torrent of fake 5 star reviews.
The first one I read even calls Java, 'the javascript' at one point.
It's an insult to decent authors and to the people who go to the trouble to write reviews that amazon allow this
Edit: I just realised why I found the names of the editor and illustrator familiar!
Ruby C. Perl and Ada R Swift
[+] [-] devgutt|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] m12k|10 years ago|reply
This may be more accurate than the author of this article believes. I've read elsewhere that precisely because FB is using pattern recognition to combat this, the cleverest of the fake accounts spend a certain amount of their time doing random/normal stuff to avoid detection. And this includes liking random businesses. And one of the problems is that if a legitimate business pays FB to promote one of their posts (so it is shown to a bigger percentage of their followers), then the more fake followers they have, the more real money they are wasting to advertise to bots. So if a business is actually using FB to engage with their userbase, then the fake likes are in fact detrimental to them.
[+] [-] corin_|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rebootthesystem|10 years ago|reply
And then it happened. FB changed the percentage of people you can reach with posts to your own page. In some cases you are lucky to get 1%. Of course, they also added the ability to reach them through advertising. Which is a travesty. I paid plenty to get them to my page in the first place and now FB wants me to pay again and again every single time I want to say something to them. Fuck them.
I know of lots of people who spent a lot more than I ever have on FB who have abandoned the platform for marketing. One guy was doing a million dollars a month with them. Gone. He brought-up exactly the same issue I describe above. So, yeah, again, fuck them. Thankfully there are other ways to reach people on the 'net.
[+] [-] florianletsch|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stingraycharles|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] josefresco|10 years ago|reply
Google deals with this re:bad links. Once they started penalizing, it became a new tactic to suppress competition.
[+] [-] GFischer|10 years ago|reply
It got a lot of "likes" which looked a lot like fake accounts trying to look less suspicious, and none of them converted to the landing page, they were just clicking "like".
[+] [-] IkmoIkmo|10 years ago|reply
> And one of the problems is that if a legitimate business pays FB to promote one of their posts
The same applies to non-paid content. Facebook will only expose your content to a portion of your users, obviously the more fake users you have the fewer real people you'll reach. Engagement levels have shown to decrease when adding fake users in previous experiments.
[+] [-] roymurdock|10 years ago|reply
This is why Yelp almost never disappoints. Kudos to the Yelp team for keeping the quality control strong and providing a great service.
[+] [-] irq-1|10 years ago|reply
Isn't the conventional wisdom that Yelp is a protection racket?
[+] [-] shampine|10 years ago|reply
Well that's not something you hear (read) everyday.
[+] [-] Goosey|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rasz_pl|10 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLkVbIsAWN2luXUhlA1bO1...
TLDR: YELP salespeople keep spamming you with phone calls, Louis was getting tired of it, but still polite (I would simply tell them to eat duck), so pointed out his friends business two blocks over pays $5K every month and seeing his books there was zero effect. What does Yelp salesperson do? She emails him PRIVATE INFORMATION OF COMPETING business :o.
[+] [-] skrebbel|10 years ago|reply
Mostly off topic, but what's "A Lincoln"?
[+] [-] Someone1234|10 years ago|reply
Even googling "A Lincoln" or "Lincoln" doesn't make it clear what they're trying to say, or how it applies.
When I read that I initially thought they meant the car company (Lincoln Motor Company), therefore I thought they were trying to say "if you spend car's worth of money you get <this>" except when you read on it is clear they didn't get enough value for that to make sense.
The short is: If you're a professional writer, blogger, journalist, or whatever and have an international audience, just stop it.
[+] [-] techstrategist|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mintplant|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] elcct|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dvh|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] silverbax88|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hackerboos|10 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Yes_Men
[+] [-] TomGullen|10 years ago|reply
"You have 3 followers"
Perhaps it would be better if they showed publicly facing ranges:
Then above 10,000 (or whatever) it shows the actual number.I see these fake like paid services losing a ton of business if social platforms took this approach.
[+] [-] puranjay|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WA|10 years ago|reply
From the article: And these days, which is more real: a fake business with a real website or a brick and mortar business with no online presence?
[+] [-] matthewmacleod|10 years ago|reply
Is there a good method to block this aggressively user-unfriendly bullshit?
[+] [-] throwaway23545|10 years ago|reply
For a new local business who is never going to get a HN or /. effect, or get some "viral buzz" from the cool kids, buying a few thousand can be a way to get to perceived neutrality. Enough likes or followers that they're no longer clicked away from for being "suspiciously" unloved.
Fake reviews on the other hand are much more directly fraudulent. Mind I'm surprised anyone at all still trusts online reviews, apart from negative ones!
[+] [-] ryandrake|10 years ago|reply
I'll turn it around: Who is stupid enough to think, "Wow, this business's carefully curated Facebook marketing page has 10,000 likes.. That must mean they are truly reputable!"
[+] [-] Animats|10 years ago|reply
We'd use D&B data if it wasn't so expensive; this is just the demo version. There's a whole industry out there tracking business info, and the search industry isn't plugged into it. (Why? Google gets about a third of its revenue from AdSense ads on other sites. If Google really cracked down on clickbait sites, Google's own revenue would drop. We once calculated it would drop 14-17%.)
Back in 2011, I wrote "Social is bad for search, and search is bad for social".[2] That's when Google had started using social signals for search ranking, and the black-hat SEO industry had discovered how easy it was to manipulate Google via social. Old-style link farming, setting up lots of fake web sites to create links, is expensive, with servers to run and sites to fill. With social spamming, the social network hosts the spam for you, for free! You can still buy "bulk likes" for Facebook.[3][4] The price has gone up a little, indicating that Facebook is having some success in getting rid of fake accounts, but not much.
[1] http://www.sitetruth.com/rating/freakinawesomekaraoke.launch... [2] http://www.sitetruth.com/doc/socialisbadforsearch09.pdf [3] http://www.buylikesandfollowers.net/buy-facebook-likes-cheap... [4] https://boostlikes.com/
[+] [-] digisth|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Bill_Dimm|10 years ago|reply
Is lacking a BBB link supposed to be a bad thing or a good thing?
http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/business-bureau-best-ratings-m...
[+] [-] rajadigopula|10 years ago|reply
Also found some gigs encouraging piracy, found a guy who claims to give 3 ebooks ( you name it) for $5 ?!
Another one who can give you any 3 Udemy courses download for $5 - https://uk.fiverr.com/udemy_guru/give-you-any-4-u-demy-cours...
I think Fiverr should hire a team to monitor the activity and authenticity of its sellers.
[+] [-] nkrisc|10 years ago|reply
That would cause most of their revenue to evaporate.
[+] [-] puranjay|10 years ago|reply
Good writing isn't something everyone can do. It takes me at least an hour to write around 500 words. A full 2k word post can take 6+ hours (since longer posts tend to be more complicated).
If I was charging Fiverr rates, I would end up making $4/hour.
[+] [-] gorhill|10 years ago|reply
I created an extension which I published in the Chrome store. I did notice a curious statistics with another similar purpose extension, which is also quite popular -- both are over 1 million users:
The ratings-per-user ratio for the other extension is almost 5 times that of my extension.[1]
I can't figure any other convincing explanation for this other than the other extension is buying ratings. If there is an alternative explanation I would like to hear it, but I can't think of one -- five times is way beyond one would expect IMO.
[1] number of ratings / number of users.
[+] [-] brianmcc|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] philbarr|10 years ago|reply
I'm not sure that Twitter could use how often you tweet as a metric. I haven't tweeted anything in years either but I still use the service to see what my favourite people are saying. I'm sure there are plenty of lurkers like me.
[+] [-] juped|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] idonthaveaname|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rcarrigan87|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marwann|10 years ago|reply
What's scary isn't the fact people buy fake reviews/followers/etc. but the fact people actually believe in these vanity metrics and want to order afterwards.
[+] [-] downandout|10 years ago|reply
Anyone still wondering if Twitter is overvalued at ~$19 billion, wonder no more.