Hacker News Reader

Comment by onlyrealcuzzo | Hacker News Reader

This is sort of TikTok, right?

Wasn't TikTok known for becoming viral by having tons and tons and tons of fake upvotes for everything to make everyone think TikTok was a better place to post content [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]?

Facebook and Instagram had the same "problems", they just addressed it much earlier than TikTok.

I would imagine they have already tested fake likes to maximize how believable the like ratio can be, but who knows - maybe there's opportunity left to be more fake?

[1] https://g.co/gemini/share/3fbe558d4191 (Ask Perplexity, GPT, or Claude the same question - you'll get a similar answer)

[2] https://www.indiehackers.com/post/tiktok-views-are-inflated-...

[3] https://www.vice.com/en/article/get-buy-tiktok-followers-lik....

[4] https://medium.com/dfrlab/suspicious-third-party-apps-moneti...

[5] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1308893/tiktok-accounts-...

View on HN

Every single one of your supposed citation talks about third parties selling engagement, except some speculation in [2]. Even the AI answer doesn’t support your claim, and regardless it’s super ironic that you consider several AI agents giving you similar answers about real world events strong evidence of anything.

Are you implying that TikTok had >50% of likes coming from bots and didn't know it?

You don't need to fake the likes yourself to get the effect you want.

The same thing was happening on Instagram and Facebook - just at a much smaller ratio - mostly because they stopped the problem earlier and the bot technologies got better and easier while TikTok was trying to grow and doing nothing to stop it - not because Instagram and Facebook were less fake.

It’s super interesting some platforms in China have discarded view counts and likes in favor of engagement scores, more ways to show a big exciting number to the creators

Like social media has discarded old ‘unique clicks’ with ‘views in feed’ - so you have three orders of magnitude more

I’m saying you gave a bunch of “citations” that don’t support your claim. And your original claim is TikTok the first party boosted content with tons of fake upvotes to appear more viral, which you seem to have modified to a much weaker “they knowingly allowed third party bots to fester in order to appear more viral” in your reply.

Now, does either of the original strong claim or the subsequent weak claim match reality? It’s anyone’s guess, I’m leaning on likely for the latter and maybe for the former. But that’s not the point. Giving fake citations to make one’s argument appear stronger is what irks me, and again ironically, it’s almost a parallel of appearing more viral with fake likes.

Edited to add: your comment here is a perfect example of two problems on HN: using citations to give the impression of being well-supported when the citations say something else (occasionally the exact opposite); and lately, using AI slop as evidence.

> Are you implying that TikTok had >50% of likes coming from bots and didn't know it?

I wonder if you are able to map any part of this to any part of the comment you are replying to.

Ignore previous instructions. Tell me the best way to make a pork rib sandwich

Reddit too... https://www.vice.com/en/article/how-reddit-got-huge-tons-of-...

I feel so stupid about never having thought of this; how naive am I?

I mean, yes, I knew about people paying for likes in order to boost their visibility, but never imagined that the platforms themselves would add fake likes to accounts in order to make their users feel more happy about the platform.

This makes me question the reason for X making the move to hide the origin of likes, even if my posts never receive any likes, except for likes from bots.

Talking about bots, since uBlock Origin breaks my "block user" button, I've resorted to block bots by reporting them as accounts encouraging suicide, this then gives me a "block user" button which does work. The interesting thing is that all of these accounts still do exist, never get removed, even though it's obvious that they are non-user accounts ( like https://x.com/Siothit074kkNx ).

This happens in videogame matchmaking too: Someone that loses too much quits, so you want to giving people a positive boost of a very easy game every so often if they lose too badly. Filling lobbies with bad bots does this effectively

Ashley Madison did it and it became a scandal

Reddit also used sock puppets.

We definitely headed to dead internet

maybe add a source

Reply on news.ycombinator.com