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.
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
"With help from some surprising footage, Derek Sivers explains how movements really get started. (Hint: it takes two.)"
I would get just 1 subscriber every day earlier. After the change, I started getting 3 a day with the same traffic.
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.
Looking for cheap appartmnts near a university, I would always go for the ones that didn't have lots of numbers taken, as it meant there was more chance I would be first to get it.
"Nobody has donated, have some compassion" works for some.
Panhandlers are common targets of theft, which may explain stashing most of what they get in various places less exposed.
source: worked in an ice cream shop
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
I thought this was bizarre, because I just happened to have read reviews of it on literary and nonliterary sites giving it extremely poor reviews.
I clicked on "See all # customer reviews" on the Amazon page and the average rating on top immediately went down to 2 stars.
I thought this was a glitch, so I tried to access the product/book page a different way. The same thing happened to all of them.
There were always the same amount of reviews, as well.
About 6 months later I looked up the book again, and the "mistake" was gone. But I had taken a screenshot of it the first time, and there was only two more reviews. The 4-star average appeared on every page.
I look for it now, and it is back at 2 stars like it always was. The book in question is Actors Anonymous.
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.
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.
Google deals with this re:bad links. Once they started penalizing, it became a new tactic to suppress competition.
But like you said, Google doesn't know who paid for them, so if they penalize spam links you can use that against competitors. There's no good solution other than "Be 100% perfect at identifying and ignoring fake links."
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.
Is there a good method to block this aggressively user-unfriendly bullshit?
Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/ublock/
Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublock-origin/cjpa...
Safari: https://www.ublock.org/newdl/safari/0.9.5.2
Alternatively: Firefox has a built-in "Reader View" button in the address bar that extracts just the text and formats it for easy reading.
It'll strip all menus, ads and other cruft leaving you just the text, headlines and pictures nicely formatted.
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?
Creates a situation where you almost have to buy some fakes to get to perception neutrality where real likes will follow.
For now. As more companies cheat the system, people will be less likely to trust them based on things like followers and reviews.
I find this sad.
The thing is that the internet is so biased towards incumbents, you need to cheat a little to get the initial pull.
This is why Yelp almost never disappoints. Kudos to the Yelp team for keeping the quality control strong and providing a great service.
Isn't the conventional wisdom that Yelp is a protection racket?
I also recently heard it alleged that they submitted fake reviews when someone wouldn't upgrade, but that was the first time I had seen that come up.
Well that's not something you hear (read) everyday.
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.
Seriously. Those facebook reviews sound authentic because those are real user stories just waiting to really happen. The real user queries prove it.
I'm so disappointed at those unfielded phone calls that I can't even bring myself to read any more. A business was born three months premature, and instead of nurturing it in neonatal intensive care, the author just let this beautiful creature die. :*(
Having read that article, you now know about the demand for karaoke vans and can go serve that market.
All downhill from here. Grab your popcorn.
Are you one of those people who insists that everyone say "he/she" every single time they don't know? If so, then why don't you also demand that the person say "she/he" 50% of the time? With no more than a specified number of imbalances per time interval and instance interval? And no more than a specified change in number of imbalances per same?
I only bring this up b/c you seem to grant yourself the title of auditor, so out of curiosity, I'd like to see if you can stand up to auditing yourself, or if you simply expect more out of others than you're able to give. My hypothesis is that you have no grounding or ability to generate introspective thought, just a little provocative scheme to grant yourself power opportunistically.
Sorry about the mistake/assumption. You asked why I made the mistake - no particular reason. (Though anecdotally I've heard males talk about these kinds of actions, while women business owners I know don't, in fact are principled about not buying fake reviews, likes, or twitter followers. The first paragraph also says "You might have seen a review on Yelp that said it’s perfect for a girl’s night out" which I read as a male stating it. Anyway I shouldn't have made the assumption.)
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.
That would cause most of their revenue to evaporate.
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.
My observations so far - the top gigs are the ones who are doing what they are good at. A few examples - https://uk.fiverr.com/ukulelebandito/write-perform-and-recor...
https://uk.fiverr.com/reverbdominatio/professional-voice-for...
I think Fiverr is for someone who can help others with their hobby, but I highly doubt if it can ever be fully grown into a professional freelancer network!?
In fact, why dont we all open source this thing.
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/
There's no right to run an anonymous business. It's illegal in the EU, and a criminal offense California if you accept credit cards. The customer needs to be able to find you and, if necessary, haul you into court to get a refund. You can register a D/B/A name and get a post office box to create a legal identity. That's fine. Hiding behind a web site with "private registration" is a scumbag flag.
Read yesterday's article about how Venmo helps scammers by making anonymous payments easy.
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...
SiteTruth can be fooled, but you usually have to commit a crime to do it. We cross-check with PhishTank to down-rate phishing sites, which helps put a lid on that problem.
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.
People who are seriously doing this aren't paying $5 a review. They are paying $100-$500. At this point I just assume almost all reviews are fake. Especially on Amazon and to a slightly lesser extent Yelp.
Mostly off topic, but what's "A Lincoln"?
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.
Look at weddings, funerals, residential remodels, residential HVAC, and the like as other examples. Some of those make used car sales look pleasant and transparent...
Does this mean those Amazon affiliate sites are illegal too? A lot of these sites review products as if they have used the them, but there is no way they could've paid real money for the dozens of products they review?
Also, how is this different from celebrities endorsing products and appearing in ads? How do we know they bothered to use the product even once, other than the time they were shooting for the ad?
In England you must make it very clear if content is your regular content of if it's sponsored content. This is hard for YouTubers to comply with because a big pre-roll splash probably isn't enough.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-30203816
http://www.theguardian.com/media/2014/nov/26/vloggers-must-t...
https://www.asa.org.uk/News-resources/Media-Centre/2014/Maki...
Of course, as you demonstrate here, there's at least some public understanding that celebrity endorsements aren't actually reviews, so a good lawyer would argue that since you don't expect celebrity endorsements to be factually true, they couldn't possibly be false advertising.
There are probably plenty of fakes, but if you're successful, brands will send you their products for you to review.
"You have 3 followers"
Perhaps it would be better if they showed publicly facing ranges:
- < 1,000 followers
- < 2,500 followers
- < 5,000 followers
- < 10,000 followers
I see these fake like paid services losing a ton of business if social platforms took this approach.
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!
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!"
Amongst the non-tech population there is trust taken from these numbers. People believe those reviews. People seem to believe that a lot of likes is indicative of trust. People used to believe that clicking blue links was good, and so the web used to be a cesspool of adsense sites providing no real information.
Sad fact is it works. Both with the algorithms - more likes gets more random likes from nowhere over time, and with the visitor perceptions. probably only the non-technical ones.
If it's on the web it must be true, right? /s
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.
I could probably quantify how much this works by adding the same sort of invitation to rate but this would go counter to the spirit of the project, so I will pass on the experimentation.
So maybe somebody should make it real.
Seems to be all legit accounts, so presumably far safer from any FB fake detection algorithms. Just don't expect them to buy your service!
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.
Anyone still wondering if Twitter is overvalued at ~$19 billion, wonder no more.
Duh...