There 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 an alarm clock.
The spammers of course are in it for nobody but themselves, so it's tough to ding them any more than the rest of folks. At least most of them seem honest about it.
There's a third party here too, though: the honest internet citizen who likes creating and sharing content and making money while doing so. They don't run bots and they actually review the stuff they talk about.
The spammers make their money because they can "fake out" the system to think they're the honest money-making folks. The danger here is that we're going to only end up with two giant contenders, the addictive social sites and the spammers. That the little guys get crushed. To me it seems that the web, once wide open, is closing in bit by bit. (That probably sounds hyperbolic. Apologies.)
The problem is that that third party is complicit in allowing this ecosystem to exist. If they would just pony up a dollar or two a month, they could exist in a world without spammers. That's all it would take.
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 suspect if people could invest in spammers there'd be a different public perception of them.
Will Skimlinks (or someone similar) offer a reverse-affiliate service that strips affiliate IDs from links on your site instead of adding them? Does this already exist?
(It would be trivial for Pinterest to manually do this, say, for Amazon, which could instantly crush a spam model based only on Amazon, without any spam network detection/banning required)
Personally, though, I think affiliate links in social networks are pretty innocuous, if not slightly positive.
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?
It's to process URLs, and it's just a part of what I need, but knowing that others might like such a thing means I'll see if I can open it up afterwards.
I'm looking to achieve this by two methods:
1) If the link contains the ID of the end page (i.e. ASIN for Amazon), then reconstruct the URL of the end page.
2) For places in which #1 fails, follow the link and seek to determine whether a permalink or canonical URL exists at the end page.
Ironically I seek to strip affiliate codes in order to add my own in my given use case... but I'm using golang and am trying to structure it all in a flow based way in which stripping and adding codes are just separate steps.
So it doesn't seem to me to be too hard to then expose each side as a service by itself.
I'm not suggesting that this is trivial to implement, but in principle, wouldn't it be fairly simple for Pinterest to identify these guys based on their 'social networks'? If a group of accounts only 'pins' posts of other accounts in that same group, that suggests either a spambot farm, or a very inclusive group of friends. False-positive detection could be decreased by looking at account sign-up dates, or profile photos.
It sounds like he only has one Amazon Associates account. Identifying all his accounts would be trivial, then -- find all accounts that have posted an Amazon link with the same associate ID in the URL.
It's fun to imagine large social networks of bots which are indistinguishable (from Pinterest's/Facebook's/Twitter's P.O.V.) from human social networks. Here, it could be a 1-man spamming operation, but you can imagine government-scale astroturfing.
As Google is killing more and more content farms, it makes sense spammers are moving towards sites that have tons of authority, and spamming there. Can't get "buy car insurance" to rank for your spamblog? No problem, create a fake question in Yahoo Answers with the keywords in your title, and a fake answer with your affiliate link. Repeat in Pinterest, Amazon Askville, Quora, etc.
This is a good point - i've seen a bunch of Facebook Notes page spam, using the Amazon affiliate program, on the first page for product SKU queries. It seems these pages can be created faster than FB can remove them, and they cycle into the first page of SERPs due to the massive domain authority of FB even though they're just spun Amazon affiliate content.
Spammers were doing that 6+ years ago. It worked. It still does.
Content farm = spamming to make money off of adsense and display advertising. What you are referring to would be more accurately termed a gateway page, for which the sole purpose is to direct a user off to an affiliate link or another site.
Aside from the (good) conversation here, I'm actually shocked the guy agreed to an interview. How many HN people just spent some time thinking about how you would do one of these? Not that nobody could have possibly thought about pinterest spamming before, but this interview has certainly increased knowledge of it
Wouldn't be surprised if 90% of their amazing growth is actually spammers creating accounts by the million daily.
The interesting thing is that Pinterest founders have an incentive to look away, while promoting their growth to the VCs, raising massive rounds whilst potentially cashing out big time. Tumblr seems to be going a similar route, maybe its a Twitter-initiated trend of bot-generated companies?)
sounded very tempting at first, but since spammers are already releasing tools to do automated spamming, they might have realized that their methods wont work forever (otherwise they would be making an irrational decision, since they could make much more money by using them themselves).
there are actually plenty of bots out there already:
It's also an easy way to generate a lot of false positives. To be a spammer does not mean to take advantage of affiliate revenue. I would say this method would be too sloppy to use by itself. It would need to be a small part of a larger set of signals.
Edit: DanielBMarkham's comment does a better job of conveying why this would be a bad approach.
http://pinterest.com/source/amzn.to/ has lots more, and they all have the default Twitter avatar which gives them away. Lots of them have terrible or inaccurate descriptions and are in the wrong category.
How are they not picking it up as spam? The same affiliate link from multiple accounts... The description also looks like a snippet of one the product reviews on Amazon
So-called "skimming" of links does not strike me as being terribly wrong (or different from what Pinterest does itself), but the practice likely still undercuts their bizmodel because they don't skim links that already have affiliate ids attached to them.
It seems to me that it's pretty dumb to leave the affiliate ids attached. If anything, I think their initial idea of replacing affiliate links with their own affiliate smart. People don't like it, they can use another site.
In 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.
Promoted tweets are a fucking scourge, at least so far. I've seen two - both times for something totally irrelevant to me. (What the hell is the Shell Houston 2012 Open? I have zero idea, and less than zero interest.)
I don't get it either. The only thing that wouldn't be kosher would be replacing existing affiliate links with their own, but I don't think they were doing that
Let's say you are a "regular" user. You "pin" x number of pins/frequency (hr/day/whatever). This establishes a normal activity baseline. Filter by "pins" that have links that have affiliate codes in them. Now, it has been shown that Skimlinks can identify these links and replace them. If that is the case, they can count the number of affiliate unique id's in their system across pinterest accounts, thereby linking seemingly disparate accounts by their affiliate links. Unless this guy is running game with multiple affiliate links or affiliate links are uniquely generated on a per item basis then I think Pinterest can put a stop to this.
Sucky thing for pinterest to deal with and it's only going to get worse for them - the obvious spam is just the tip of the iceberg, the more insidious stuff can go undetected pretty much forever judging by HN, Reddit etc.
First of all: They believe a screenshot to prove identity?
I could've faked that in 10 seconds with Firebug and then told them I make like $10,000 a day with my super hardcore h4ck0r bots and the would have believed it I guess.
I think he is using URL shorteners or custom URLs that looks like a blog but are a redirect to an affiliate URL. Now they'd have to start examining the URLs in detail, which is a lot harder. Especially if he cloaks for access that looks to be coming from Pinterest themselves.
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.
I don't think it violates any specific law, but I'm guessing that a prosecutor could come up with some charges if the website hired good enough lawyers. Charges similar to the ones you see for denial of service or computer fraud.
[+] [-] DanielBMarkham|14 years ago|reply
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 an alarm clock.
The spammers of course are in it for nobody but themselves, so it's tough to ding them any more than the rest of folks. At least most of them seem honest about it.
There's a third party here too, though: the honest internet citizen who likes creating and sharing content and making money while doing so. They don't run bots and they actually review the stuff they talk about.
The spammers make their money because they can "fake out" the system to think they're the honest money-making folks. The danger here is that we're going to only end up with two giant contenders, the addictive social sites and the spammers. That the little guys get crushed. To me it seems that the web, once wide open, is closing in bit by bit. (That probably sounds hyperbolic. Apologies.)
[+] [-] debacle|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] user2459|14 years ago|reply
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 suspect if people could invest in spammers there'd be a different public perception of them.
[+] [-] joshuahedlund|14 years ago|reply
(It would be trivial for Pinterest to manually do this, say, for Amazon, which could instantly crush a spam model based only on Amazon, without any spam network detection/banning required)
Personally, though, I think affiliate links in social networks are pretty innocuous, if not slightly positive.
[+] [-] blhack|14 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] buro9|14 years ago|reply
It's to process URLs, and it's just a part of what I need, but knowing that others might like such a thing means I'll see if I can open it up afterwards.
I'm looking to achieve this by two methods:
1) If the link contains the ID of the end page (i.e. ASIN for Amazon), then reconstruct the URL of the end page.
2) For places in which #1 fails, follow the link and seek to determine whether a permalink or canonical URL exists at the end page.
Ironically I seek to strip affiliate codes in order to add my own in my given use case... but I'm using golang and am trying to structure it all in a flow based way in which stripping and adding codes are just separate steps.
So it doesn't seem to me to be too hard to then expose each side as a service by itself.
[+] [-] thegyppo|14 years ago|reply
Skimlinks already ignores their redirect if the link is already affiliated so I'm guessing they could just reverse this logic & have a solution.
[+] [-] pavel_lishin|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dangrossman|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joe42|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bproper|14 years ago|reply
e.g: pictures of cakes on a recipe board about desserts that link back to a cookbook and he gets 4 cents per click through...
[+] [-] DanBC|14 years ago|reply
That's the most abusive part. As a Pinterest user I want to see what other real users are pinning. I don't want to see what 4,000 bots are pinning.
[+] [-] drumdance|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thedaveoflife|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bemmu|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AznHisoka|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jaredmck|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AJ007|14 years ago|reply
Content farm = spamming to make money off of adsense and display advertising. What you are referring to would be more accurately termed a gateway page, for which the sole purpose is to direct a user off to an affiliate link or another site.
[+] [-] slouch|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] krelian|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jcdavis|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cowkingdeluxe|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] akrymski|14 years ago|reply
The interesting thing is that Pinterest founders have an incentive to look away, while promoting their growth to the VCs, raising massive rounds whilst potentially cashing out big time. Tumblr seems to be going a similar route, maybe its a Twitter-initiated trend of bot-generated companies?)
[+] [-] jcfrei|14 years ago|reply
there are actually plenty of bots out there already:
http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackhat-seo/buy-sell-trade/419...
http://pinblaster.com/
[+] [-] rokhayakebe|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] codexon|14 years ago|reply
http://pinterest.com/source/amazon.com/
I think the spammer moved his affiliate tag to womansdesign-20.
[+] [-] coderdude|14 years ago|reply
Edit: DanielBMarkham's comment does a better job of conveying why this would be a bad approach.
[+] [-] Sodaware|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chrisohara|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] taylorbuley|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SpiderX|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] toddnessa|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] krschultz|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pavel_lishin|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ebaysucks|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jcdavis|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Steko|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] siculars|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] benologist|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dustingetz|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] webjunkie|14 years ago|reply
I could've faked that in 10 seconds with Firebug and then told them I make like $10,000 a day with my super hardcore h4ck0r bots and the would have believed it I guess.
[+] [-] unknown|14 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] huhtenberg|14 years ago|reply
This suggest a trivial fix for the problem on Pinterest's side, doesn't it?
[+] [-] TomAnthony|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hammer9|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shagbag|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cowkingdeluxe|14 years ago|reply