[zipiridu]

The "fraud economy" was democratized in the last decade but it has always existed. Previously you needed to be rich, powerful, and well connected to have media companies cover your business/product. Now you can buy fake engagement, reviews, upvotes, etc with a few click so everyone does it. If you don't do it you will be outcompeted by the ones who do. I've experienced this myself. I tried buying ads and writing organic posts but got little traffic on a site I wanted to promote. Then I decided to spend a few hundred dollars on fake upvotes and my ROI was easily 20x better than on ads. I had to be a bit more careful so it wasn't too obvious but I learned that these dark patterns work. I've heard of similar tactics used by unicorn startups in their early stages at much larger scale. The reviews weren't trustworthy before either, it's just more obvious now.

[lifeisstillgood]

>>> The "fraud economy" was democratized in the last decade but it has always existed. Previously you needed to be rich, powerful, and well connected to have media companies cover your business/product. Now you can buy fake engagement, reviews, upvotes, etc with a few click so everyone does it.

Yes. And this is a pattern we are seeing all over - thank you. It's it necessarily good or bad. just more open, democratic, cheaper.

[evgen]

The fact that it was previously restricted to only monied interests means that it was relatively rare in the past. Yes, there were the magazines and floating 'reviewers' who everyone learned were shills for whatever company was paying them for a good review, but the bulk of the reviews were earnestly trying to live up to consumer expectations for such reviews. Once things became more 'democratic' and cheaper we saw the review version of Gresham's Law at work -- fraudulent reviews flooded out sincere ones and the system has mostly because useless for its intended purpose, it is now just another marketing channel.

[ClumsyPilot]

"It's it necessarily good or bad. just more open, democratic, cheaper"

Thats not like a sensible rule of thumb. If we 'democratise' landmines, it would be clearly bad. This is similar

[batty_alex]

The system is broken and everyone needs to cheat to participate. That’s bad - not some amoral democratized system

[Scoundreller]

What I find funny is when some multibillion company buys tens of thousands of followers on Twitter, but each post gets like 1 like or 1 comment. Like, hello!!!!!

But maybe it's because of FTC rules: fake followers are legally okay, but fake likes and fake comments could be considered a fake review and therefore FTC violation.

[thow-58d4e8b]

Another giveaway is accounts posting multi-sentence comments or reviews within seconds of their previous submissions. How can this get past bot checks is beyond me

[nprateem]

A friend was wondering where you learnt about this stuff?