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Comment by zipiridu | Hacker News Reader

The "fraud economy" was democratized in the last decade but it has always existed. Previously you needed to be rich, powerful, and well connected to have media companies cover your business/product. Now you can buy fake engagement, reviews, upvotes, etc with a few click so everyone does it. If you don't do it you will be outcompeted by the ones who do. I've experienced this myself. I tried buying ads and writing organic posts but got little traffic on a site I wanted to promote. Then I decided to spend a few hundred dollars on fake upvotes and my ROI was easily 20x better than on ads. I had to be a bit more careful so it wasn't too obvious but I learned that these dark patterns work. I've heard of similar tactics used by unicorn startups in their early stages at much larger scale. The reviews weren't trustworthy before either, it's just more obvious now.

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>>> The "fraud economy" was democratized in the last decade but it has always existed. Previously you needed to be rich, powerful, and well connected to have media companies cover your business/product. Now you can buy fake engagement, reviews, upvotes, etc with a few click so everyone does it.

Yes. And this is a pattern we are seeing all over - thank you. It's it necessarily good or bad. just more open, democratic, cheaper.

The fact that it was previously restricted to only monied interests means that it was relatively rare in the past. Yes, there were the magazines and floating 'reviewers' who everyone learned were shills for whatever company was paying them for a good review, but the bulk of the reviews were earnestly trying to live up to consumer expectations for such reviews. Once things became more 'democratic' and cheaper we saw the review version of Gresham's Law at work -- fraudulent reviews flooded out sincere ones and the system has mostly because useless for its intended purpose, it is now just another marketing channel.

It's the problem. We need a spam filter for reviews. Let's create a startup and fake it growth with fake reviews. «Fake it, until you make it.»

"It's it necessarily good or bad. just more open, democratic, cheaper"

Thats not like a sensible rule of thumb. If we 'democratise' landmines, it would be clearly bad. This is similar

I get what you mean, but honestly, fake reviews != landmines.

The system is broken and everyone needs to cheat to participate. That’s bad - not some amoral democratized system

What I find funny is when some multibillion company buys tens of thousands of followers on Twitter, but each post gets like 1 like or 1 comment. Like, hello!!!!!

But maybe it's because of FTC rules: fake followers are legally okay, but fake likes and fake comments could be considered a fake review and therefore FTC violation.

Another giveaway is accounts posting multi-sentence comments or reviews within seconds of their previous submissions. How can this get past bot checks is beyond me

For the same reason that on facebook I still get daily friend requests from very sexy women with a brand new profile, 4 friends total, none in common, in a random location in the world with 1 post linking to some dating site. It's because they just don't care. Well, either that or facebook engineers are completely incompetent.

> Well, either that or facebook engineers are completely incompetent.

Or they're making bank on dating site affiliate fees as a side hustle...

They don’t need to. The increased time you spend in the site as a consequence is enough of an upside to look the other way.

This really isn't true. Remember that FB has many, many users and (presumably) many, many scammers, so one would expect to see lots of scams.

I too get those (messages lately) friend requests, and almost always by the time I read the message the account has been deactivated (when it says FB user).

So, overall, I think they're doing a reasonably good job on this particular problem.

My experience is different. I have many times reported a profile like this. Exactly as described above, a child can see it's a scam account. And then a couple of days later got message that after review the profile doesn't violate the community standards.

really? That's very odd (not that their reporting system sucks, it definitely does), but that you need to report it.

Interesting that we have such different experiences, I wonder why that is. (remember that on FB, a 1 in a million event occurs approximately 3k times per day).

The social networks don't mind the bots if it leads to engagement. Their "anti-bot" policy is a joke. They know who the bots are. They only ban the ones that are anti-engagement (which they can also determine).

Absolutely this.

Just a couple of days back, something had been bothering me about some new-ish commenters I'd encountered on Reddit, so I did an unscientific check. I realised that about a year or so back, Reddit quietly made it so that when you create an account, they autosuggest a username of the form "Word1-Word2-Number" or "Word1Word2Number", making it hard to tell apart from automated bot/astroturf accounts.

(Try it out -- look at the profiles of any account you encounter that has the above form, and they've been created pretty much always on/after October 2020)

My conspiracy theory is that this was a growth marketing hack to muddy the obvious differences between regular people accounts and bots/spammers.

A friend was wondering where you learnt about this stuff?

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