Feedburner hack: how to get 2500 subscribers overnight (video) | Hacker News Reader

Feedburner hack: how to get 2500 subscribers overnight (video)

thenextweb.org

21 pointsjoop20 comments

I’ve sacrificed my personal blog for a hacking experiment and the result; faking your subscriber count IS possible!

Not quite. It's just a broken tracking system. I guess you could do this trick to make some poor blogger think he just got 723459288 new subscribers overnight, but you can't actually cause him to have that many.

Exactly, and that's why they have to fix it. We talk about numbers here, which is a key indicator for many to see how popular a website is; We brought this to light so Google/Feedburner will finally address it

And what, exactly, do you want FeedBurner to do? They're just using the number NetVibes gives them and I doubt NetVibes is going to give them the ability to inspect user accounts to check for dupe subscriptions. So unless your solution for FeedBurner is "don't count NetVibes (or other aggregators that report inaccurately)", there's nothing for them to do.

Oh, be creative. Just off the top of my head: Feedburner could separate out aggregator reported counts, or show two numbers, one with aggregators and one without.

Or boost your own numbers to get more followers. More followers leads to more followers, which leads to anger, which leads to hate which leads to suffering...

which leads...to the dark side.

of course, now it all makes sense.

I'm curious if inflating your RSS subscriber number gains you any significant amount of extra subscribers. My guess is no.

Might help when selling RSS ads I guess.

It could influence new viewers initial opinions. The site having 5K subscribers instead of a handful...

Actually, according to Aweber, it does (at least for email subscriptions, displaying a chiclet with subscriber numbers increases opt-in).

It's a form of social proof.

Is there some sort of evidence of that? I guessed no because I assumed most people don't even see it, but maybe people on the fence about subscribing do.

There's plenty of evidence that social proof works, it's just a questions of whether there's something special about FeedBurner that would invalidate social proof mechanics.

I don't think FeedBurner can fix this, short of not counting aggregators that incorrectly report subscriber numbers (like NetVibes is doing in this case).

As you can see in the video they add 1000 times the same feedurl. there is no reason to allow this so it would be extremely easy to fix for Netvibes.

Exactly, the onus is on Netvibes, not FeedBurner.

why should Net Vibes fix this? It doesn't affect their user experience one bit, why should they waste programmer hours fixing someone else's problem? For them its better to leave this thing open since it means more free exposure.

Because they're the ones that have the ability to fix it. FeedBurner can't determine the real subscriber number from the one NetVibes gives them, so it's up to NetVibes to report an accurate number.

Relying on a third party to "do the right thing" is a dangerous path to take. It's like putting up a robots.txt and saying it's up to the crawler programmers/users to respect the rules.

Net Vibes (and most other web-based feed readers) does not request the feed every time it is requested, they request the feed periodically if any of their members have subscribed to the feed. In that request they include the number of subscribers they are requesting for.

Net Vibes has implemented it slightly wrong and are sending the number of "boxes" that contain the feed, not the number of users who have at least one box with the feed.

So when Feedburner sees a GET on their feed with metadata from Net Vibes saying how many subscribers there are, they can either ignore it (since it can be gamed) or use it. I find it valuable that they use it so I hope that Net Vibes fixes it.

Feedburner could ignore huge jumps from Net Vibes but the attack would work with slower growth, leading to distorted statistics.

Incredible! Wonder how long it will take before feedburner fixes this...

On Techcrunch too: http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/08/04/all-it-takes-to-inflate...

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