If you're a street musician setting up to play with an open instrument case, it's pretty important to "seed the pot" by throwing a few dollars and some change into the case. Not because you make any money from your own "donation", but because it shows passers-by what the arrangement is, and adds an element of social pressure ("Somebody donated, so I should too!").<p>I can see this as similar. There's something pathetic about being the first Twitter follower, or the 6th "Like", and something scary, particularly for a local business, about vouching for something you're not really 100% sure on. Writing the 4th 5 star review is a lot easier than the 1st one, and it's easy, and more anonymous, to be the 45th Like.<p>I don't support these services, and think we need good heuristics to stop them, but I can totally see why even an early influx of a few fake followers and reviews would "seed the pot", and be worth <i>way</i> more to a business's eventual health than $20-40.
"Facebook says it uses pattern recognition to find and eliminate click farms and accounts that exist solely to like pages. Since March, says Facebook, it’s “notified 200,000 Pages that we’ve protected their accounts from fake likes.” I love the way they put this: “Protected,” as if the companies hadn’t paid for them."<p>This may be more accurate than the author of this article believes. I've read elsewhere that precisely because FB is using pattern recognition to combat this, the cleverest of the fake accounts spend a certain amount of their time doing random/normal stuff to avoid detection. And this includes liking random businesses. And one of the problems is that if a legitimate business pays FB to promote one of their posts (so it is shown to a bigger percentage of their followers), then the more fake followers they have, the more real money they are wasting to advertise to bots. So if a business is actually using FB to engage with their userbase, then the fake likes are in fact detrimental to them.
<i>Yelp was the only company that caught us, hiding both of the reviews I bought behind their “not recommended” click wall and not counting them in F.A.K.E.’s rating. It has software that screens out suspicious reviews, not including them in a company’s star-rating. If they see too many of them, they will penalize a business’s page, putting a “consumer alert” on the profile for 90 days warning visitors that they think the business is buying fake reviews. People on Fiverr who were selling reviews would often say “No Yelp” in their descriptions, saying it was hard to make those “stick.”</i><p>This is why Yelp almost never disappoints. Kudos to the Yelp team for keeping the quality control strong and providing a great service.
> <i>A Lincoln could get me a Facebook review, a Google review, an Amazon review, or, less easily, a Yelp review.</i><p>Mostly off topic, but what's "A Lincoln"?
There's a whole seedy world under the surface of Fiverr, and I'm surprised no one seems to have done an in-depth "Inside Fiverr" piece yet. Vectorization services that present as individuals in the US but are actually farmed out to workshops in non-English speaking countries. Voice actors whose work samples consist mainly of dubious get-rich-quick ads. And as this article points out, "SEO" and "reputation building" services as far as the eye can see. (For $5, you can have your yoga "article" featured on this woman's website, complete with up to "three... dofollow links": <a href="https://www.fiverr.com/maigent/post-your-content-on-my-yoga-fitness-and-health-site" rel="nofollow">https://www.fiverr.com/maigent/post-your-content-on-my-yoga-...</a>)
In 2004, two czech graduate created massive campain for fake hypermarket: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czech_Dream" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czech_Dream</a>
A lot of this problem seems to come from Facebook/Twitter showing:<p>"You have 3 followers"<p>Perhaps it would be better if they showed publicly facing ranges:<p><pre><code> - < 1,000 followers
- < 2,500 followers
- < 5,000 followers
- < 10,000 followers
</code></pre>
Then above 10,000 (or whatever) it shows the actual number.<p>I see these fake like paid services losing a ton of business if social platforms took this approach.
That was a good write-up. Thing is, this works. Even (or especially) for startups. Only if to kickstart the hype a bit. Real followers and likes will follow, but let's be honest here: Who doesn't automatically trust a business that has 19K Twitter followers and a few good reviews out there?<p>From the article: <i>And these days, which is more real: a fake business with a real website or a brick and mortar business with no online presence?</i>
This site brought up at lease two separate overlay popups while attempting to read it. I don't usually complain about this, but that's totally obnoxious and meant I didn't finish reading the article.<p>Is there a good method to block this aggressively user-unfriendly bullshit?
But who, in this day and age, would trust or hire a new online business that had a page with 0-100 likes? The apparent presumption on seeing under 1k likes or under a few thousand twitter followers is the business is defective. Or forgotten, or no good. <i>The incorrect wisdom of the crowd is that a legit business has a certain number of likes, followers etc, or it looks suspicious</i><p>For a new local business who is never going to get a HN or /. effect, or get some "viral buzz" from the cool kids, buying a few thousand can be a way to get to perceived neutrality. Enough likes or followers that they're no longer clicked away from for being "suspiciously" unloved.<p>Fake reviews on the other hand are much more directly fraudulent. Mind I'm surprised anyone at all still trusts online reviews, apart from negative ones!
I'm very aware of this problem. I set up Sitetruth.com to try to combat it. Here's what Sitetruth has on Launchrock.[1] Is there an street address on the web site? No. Anything we can tie to a list of US businesses? No. Better Business Bureau link? No. SEC filings? No. Rating: Do Not Enter. SiteTruth takes the position, "when in doubt, rate it down".<p>We'd use D&B data if it wasn't so expensive; this is just the demo version. There's a whole industry out there tracking business info, and the search industry isn't plugged into it. (Why? Google gets about a third of its revenue from AdSense ads on other sites. If Google really cracked down on clickbait sites, Google's own revenue would drop. We once calculated it would drop 14-17%.)<p>Back in 2011, I wrote "Social is bad for search, and search is bad for social".[2] That's when Google had started using social signals for search ranking, and the black-hat SEO industry had discovered how easy it was to manipulate Google via social. Old-style link farming, setting up lots of fake web sites to create links, is expensive, with servers to run and sites to fill. With social spamming, the social network hosts the spam for you, for free! You can still buy "bulk likes" for Facebook.[3][4] The price has gone up a little, indicating that Facebook is having some success in getting rid of fake accounts, but not much.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.sitetruth.com/rating/freakinawesomekaraoke.launchrock.com?format=popup" rel="nofollow">http://www.sitetruth.com/rating/freakinawesomekaraoke.launch...</a>
[2] <a href="http://www.sitetruth.com/doc/socialisbadforsearch09.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.sitetruth.com/doc/socialisbadforsearch09.pdf</a>
[3] <a href="http://www.buylikesandfollowers.net/buy-facebook-likes-cheap.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.buylikesandfollowers.net/buy-facebook-likes-cheap...</a>
[4] <a href="https://boostlikes.com/" rel="nofollow">https://boostlikes.com/</a>
I have been on Fiverr for few weeks and ordered two articles for $5 from some guy claiming from the US. The result was hilarious; a kindergarten kid can use much better grammar.<p>Also found some gigs encouraging piracy, found a guy who claims to give 3 ebooks ( you name it) for $5 ?!<p>Another one who can give you any 3 Udemy courses download for $5 - <a href="https://uk.fiverr.com/udemy_guru/give-you-any-4-u-demy-courses?context=advanced_search&context_type=auto&pos=34&funnel=cddb1796-5f30-4230-a8f9-c4127e8c40e0" rel="nofollow">https://uk.fiverr.com/udemy_guru/give-you-any-4-u-demy-cours...</a><p>I think Fiverr should hire a team to monitor the activity and authenticity of its sellers.
A personal observation in the Chrome store.<p>I created an extension which I published in the Chrome store. I did notice a curious statistics with another similar purpose extension, which is also quite popular -- both are over 1 million users:<p>The ratings-per-user ratio for the other extension is almost <i>5 times</i> that of my extension.[1]<p>I can't figure any other convincing explanation for this other than the other extension is buying ratings. If there is an alternative explanation I would like to hear it, but I can't think of one -- five times is way beyond one would expect IMO.<p>[1] number of ratings / number of users.
I actually don't know whether to be annoyed/dismayed or <i>impressed</i>. There's something really quite accomplished about this bizarre, entirely abstract, virtual enterprise.
"My sudden surge in popularity raised no flags at Twitter headquarters as far as I could tell, even though many of the followers had egg avatars who hadn’t tweeted in years."<p>I'm not sure that Twitter could use how often you tweet as a metric. I haven't tweeted anything in years either but I still use the service to see what my favourite people are saying. I'm sure there are plenty of lurkers like me.
How can we be sure that this article isn't a deep-cover "fake review" for Yelp? It tells a convincing story and manages to throw in Yelp's huge music selection - I mean, its effectiveness at removing fake reviews.
This is particularly bad in the moving industry. Not only are movers notorious for bribing customers to post good reviews but there are also several well ranking "Moving Specific" review sites that are completely fake. The industry also happens to have some of the most horrific scams...
In France, an agency created a fake company selling kebap sandwich on Mars. They had 105.000 views on their video, 46k followers, 20k facebook fans...and orders.<p>What's scary isn't the fact people buy fake reviews/followers/etc. but the fact people actually believe in these vanity metrics and want to order afterwards.
<i>"He claimed he’d created 5 million Twitter accounts...."</i><p>Anyone still wondering if Twitter is overvalued at ~$19 billion, wonder no more.
Paul Graham said that if there is alot of potential energy from a broken system there must be a way to monetize it. Really, it seems like someone can make a startup to verify the company and reviews.<p>In fact, why dont we all open source this thing.
CBS Canada, did this about a year ago, very interesting watch: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3y0pYUdfGiw" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3y0pYUdfGiw</a>
<i>Yes, writing fake reviews is illegal. False advertising is a misdemeanor crime</i><p>Does this mean those Amazon affiliate sites are illegal too? A lot of these sites review products as if they have used the them, but there is no way they could've paid real money for the dozens of products they review?<p>Also, how is this different from celebrities endorsing products and appearing in ads? How do we know they bothered to use the product even once, other than the time they were shooting for the ad?
You don't have to pay for it, btw. There are sites you can post to in order to attract people that will just like/follow your stuff for free. It doesn't take much searching to find them. You won't get the same numbers, but if you're on a budget, it works.
"He claimed he’d created 5 million Twitter accounts using scripts, and had completed 10,000 Fiverr orders for Twitter followers. He’d been banned from Fiverr three times before but says he doesn’t know why."<p>Duh...
As an entrepreneur, I became so disappointed with this article about 60% of the way through, that I had to stop reading. When the author started getting phone calls on his burner phone from people wanting to hire his van, he should have manned up, stuck with this damn business, and written instead about bootstrapping. With stats like the ones he reported, he should have stuck with Freakin' Awesome Karaoke Express even if it meant moonlighting as a KJ and eventually backing into a seed round he never anticipated.<p>Seriously. Those facebook reviews sound authentic because those are real user stories just waiting to really happen. The real user queries prove it.<p>I'm so disappointed at those unfielded phone calls that I can't even bring myself to read any more. A business was born three months premature, and instead of nurturing it in neonatal intensive care, the author just let this beautiful creature die. :*(