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Comment by maybesofast | Hacker News Reader

This article is kind of only half-thought through. Facebook is making contact to the user on behalf of this person that claims to be 'advancetehri', it is not a 'cold' invite by Facebook. This user 'advancetehri' used the invite a user feature and put this person's number in.

Evil plan to grab new users? No.

I feel like a vast majority of people take every single chance they get to argue that Facebook is out to get them.

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Guess your comment is actually half-thought. I'm the person this blog post is talking about. And I'm pretty sure, I (and none of us in my family) even remotely know this 'advancetehri' guy. And who the hell has a name like that?

Also, when I clicked that link and when @iambibhas clicked that link, we both got immediate friend request from 'advancetehri'. (We blurred the link because it exposes the full phone number to anyone who clicks it) Rings a bell?

Evil plan to grab new users? Yes.

I'm pretty sure, I (and none of us in my family) even remotely know this 'advancetehri' guy

Doesn't change the fact that anybody can enter any phone number and upload it to Facebook.

when I clicked that link and when @iambibhas clicked that link, we both got immediate friend request from 'advancetehri'.

This sounds like an oversight on Facebook's side. The link should only to be used by one account of the person invited.

Evil plan to grab new users?

No.

You really don't get the point? Friendship request is an action From one user(say B) to another user(say A). Person A got sms because B sent a friend request to A only! Why the hell would I or @rish404 get a friend request from person B is we click that link? The link is a notification sms of an event, it should not contain an action that says "Send friend request to anyone who clicks this link from person B". Do you now understand my point?

Speculation: When someone generates friend requests e.g. by allowing Facebook to mine their address book, FB only has to generate a single friend request ID. (I'm not saying this is the "right" way to do this.)

You need to do a better job of blurring (or just black-boxing). I didn't really try, but it appeared I was able with a bit of effort to make out faint images of the blurred characters.

There's definitely a pile-on effect happening. Consider that story about click fraud a few weeks back. As far as I can tell click fraud isn't any worse on Facebook than it is on any other ad network, but they took a disproportionate amount of heat.

If we're thinking of the same article, it wasn't about click fraud, but rather a unique-to-Facebook class of users that heavily devalues click-throughs on Facebook ads.

I'm talking about this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4312731 which does not describe anything unique to facebook as far as I can tell.

I think it's a combination of the over-priced, under-performing stock, advertisers realizing that fb isn't that great of an ad platform that makes the shine come off of FB and make stuff like this seem less acceptable than it would have just a couple months ago.

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