Comment by GreySquall | Hacker News Reader

Comment by GreySquall | Hacker News Reader

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The Veritasium videos on my post provide a decent counterpoint to the idea that there's a potential "credibility" upside of having a bunch of fake accounts like your page.

For example, let's say you have a mix of 90% fake likes, and 10% real/organic likes, presumable because they saw your page, saw all of the likes, and thought, "I want to be in on this."

Now, let's say that I post something, and chances are that it's only going to be seen by 100 people. This means that whatever I post will be put in front of 90 garbage accounts and in front of only 10 people who I actually want to target. Unfortunately I can't target based on fake vs. organic accounts.

If I want to increase that 10ppl number, then I'll have to pay more to increase the visibility across the entire population. Let's say I pay $10 to get 200 people to see what I've posted, then 180 fake accounts see it, and only 20 real/organic people see it.

Unsuspecting businesses of any kind, and especially small ones, can't afford to waste money on this kind of mess.

I appreciate your explanation. Let's go with your numbers, and say 90% of likes are bots, while 10% are real. You're getting much less value from your ad spend than you would if 100% of the likes were real, but so is everyone else who's running ads.

Meanwhile, the 10% real people have friends who could potentially like your brand organically as they see it in their feed. These second-degree-of-separation people, who have not seen your ad, will first be exposed to your brand through their friends' likes. You're building mindshare, however minor. In the small chance they decide to check out your page, having a believable number of likes already on your page is beneficial in winning their attention -- and interaction. The post that talks about 'bootstrapping' your likes with SE Asian users who are more like-prone to entice the Japanese/Korean likes is making the same point.

There is no doubt that bot-likes are much less useful than real-person likes, but they're not useless.

You raise a completely fair point, and conceptually I agree with you.

Again, this entire example rests on the assumption that bots DO exist, which it sounds like they do based on everyone's comments so far.

The point I want to drive home is that there is a segment of the population doing business online and, for better or worse, including FB as part of their ad strategy. FB knows this and makes the entire ad BUYING process cheap and easy, knowing FULL well that these ad buyers are going to receive crap for engagement.

Before confirming my purchase, if FB gave me a warning saying something along the lines of "based on your targeting and how much you're paying for this ad, about 10% of your engagement will be from real people," then at the very least FB has both acknowledged the risk and done something to manage my expectations. Perhaps we wouldn't even been having this exchange.

But, FB doesn't. They keep quiet about this, allowing the farms to exist to make it seem as those unsuspecting business owners are actually getting what they paid for. That's the scam in all of this.

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