[americafun]

> But perhaps we should not be surprised by the lack of interest in fraud exhibited by Twitter’s former management. The tech industry in general suffers from a cancerous disposition towards encouraging fake traffic, fake users, and fake online activity because it makes businesses appear to be more successful than they really are. Criminals are fed millions of dollars by executives who think that price is worth paying if it will mislead investors into believing inflated valuations. The presumption is that current losses are also worth sustaining because the business will turn today’s paper valuation into real value at some vaguely-defined point in the future.

That's it. If you can't figure someone's intentions, look at their actions, and infer the intentions.

[hrunt]

At a previous job, we had a product that was attractive with criminals. We were seeing some elevated chargeback rates and refund rates, so I dug in and determined that at least 25% of our new account purchases were fraudulent (unreported stolen credit cards). I put in some rudimentary fraud analysis, and injected a hoop that suspected fraud users had to go through before their account would be billed, simply to prevent the credit card networks from blacklisting our merchant account. The fraud rates dropped considerably with a small false-positive rate, but the new-user metrics slowed with it.

A week after I left my role, the company disabled it. They were sure that the system was a significant cause of some major userbase declines. Within three months, one of their credit card processors threatened to lock them out for elevated fraud rates, and they spent the next six months getting it resolved. Growth never returned.

No one was trying to be dishonest, but no one wanted to look bad, either. The entirety of the metrics showed something was off, but the growth narrative was so important, it was easy to ignore the questionable parts.

This was not a VC-backed business, so the pressure to perform was entirely internal. Nothing was faked, but the success wasn't (entirely) real, either.

[moremetadata]

I think this TikTokker found out to her peril that a million followers many of them bots can be expensive and humiliating.

Same TikTokker different Reddit Threads. https://www.reddit.com/r/TikTokCringe/comments/vkv8hu/aww_th... https://www.reddit.com/r/sadcringe/comments/wf1a0k/nigerian_...

Still those bots probably helped make TikTok popular and probably helped boost stock prices, like we see with other social media platforms and even SuperStonk!

https://www.reddit.com/r/Superstonk/

If you or someone you know has a social media presence with people you dont know, do the <s>computer</s> bots say no?