Hacker News Reader

Comment by huggyface | Hacker News Reader

They end the bot section with "But let's move on, because who the bots belong to isn't provable." after saying that they weren't accusing Facebook of running the bots. The subtext is screaming out.

Does me pointing out the barely shrouded subtext mean that I believe what they are saying? Of course not. It's just as likely, it seems, that their test is simply flawed (as others said, let's see the technical honey trap), that it's some other technical fault, etc. I highly doubt, just on intuition, that Facebook is running such broken bots: Come on, they'd do a better job than make something so easily detected.

View on HN

I actually think they were trying to say something strange is going on, which I think is pretty obvious given their stats, and that they have no idea who's doing it or why, partially because Facebook can't be bothered to look into it or at least get back to them about it.

That to me sounds like FB is aware of the issue and isn't interested in discussing it. That's the subtext imo.

My own suspicion would be because someone is gaming their ads and they haven't been able to prevent it as of yet, and not because they themselves are gaming the numbers. No doubt they believe that discussing it is tacit admission that they haven't been able to prevent it, which is bad for business.

I see what you're saying, it just isn't very hard for me to take them at their word: They're not claiming that it's Facebook, not out of some sense of propriety, but because they don't have any evidence that it is. It could be anyone.

And it doesn't matter who it is, because they're leaving for a different reason: Facebook never returns their calls unless it's with an offer of extortion.

It would be outrageous for FB to run the bots themselves. There's two other issues that are more realistic and unfortunately not so great for FB: they're aware of the bots and ignoring them in favor of the ad revenue or they're just becoming aware of the bots and will implement some fix which could result in a substantial decrease in ad revenue. Good to keep in mind that OP's 80% is just one data point and may not be accurate.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com