The crux of the article was presented near the top:<p>"on social media it is easy to mistake popularity for credibility"<p>I wouldn't say this is limited to social media. This flaw is present in search engines as well, which is why link farms work (and search engines are in a constant, futile battle against them). In politics, it's why astroturfing works and why the more you spend on saturation advertising, the better your chances are. It's really a flaw in human nature--to confuse popularity for credibility.<p>I'm convinced that anything out there, online or off, with a ranking system that relies on popularity (counts of links, likes, eyeballs, votes, etc.) is ripe for disruption. What's the alternative way to separate genuine credibility from fake (purchased) credibility? Figure it out and you'll be a billionaire.
It's a prisoner's dilemma degenerating into a tragedy of the commons. If I refrain from artificially boosting my follower count, but you don't, I lose and you win, and vice versa. If we both refrain, we both benefit, albeit only from the <i>real</i> work we put into organically growing our followers. If neither of us refrain, the numbers become increasingly meaningless and we're left with no way to demonstrate our credibility.
Medium's image blurring "feature" is kind of annoying sometimes. I'm trying to look at the picture, and I want to scroll to see the bottom of it, and then the picture just suddenly becomes obscured for no reason. I know it's to make the caption more readable, but I want to look at the caption and the picture at the same time. They should just put a caption in a darkened, translucent region.
From a SEO standpoint, it makes sense (and the author's post is very insightful and well done)...but...I would have to ask what the end goal is? If you are an interesting person, people follow you because you are interesting. If not, you've got a bunch of fake followers and people who follow you because they think you are important or have a good retweet reach. You become like many mainstream celebrities - famous for no good reason.<p>I've found Twitter to be a far more valuable experience when rather than try to accumulate followers, you follow people with similar interests and interact with them. I always follow people who follow me as a courtesy (unless they are a bot), even if it makes my followers/following ratio "look bad." The majority of the time, these followers are actually interesting to read because even if they don't make cool stuff, they retweet about people who do and I learn about many projects I would not have otherwise. When you interact with your followers, you multiply your reach by a whole new magnitude because they will often retweet to their followers (if maximizing reach is one of your goals).<p>Also, as a side/bonus note, one "hidden" feature of Twitter is that it has built in analytics (I say "hidden" because its not immediately obvious where to find it):
<a href="http://analytics.twitter.com/" rel="nofollow">http://analytics.twitter.com/</a>
> "on social media it is easy to mistake popularity for credibility"<p>This happens in real life also. World leaders are chosen based on popularity and not credibility. That isn't to say all popular people are not credible or even most popular people are not credible. Just that there are a lot of important positions that are filled by popular or likable idiots.
The only real takeaway from this article for me is that Klout really sucks... Not just that it sucks on its own, but its suck is screwing up Bing SRPs and therefore incentivizing spambots.
Seems intuitive, though interesting to see some actual data. I'd love to know how much the author's "real followers" increased after the artificial boost.<p>This reminds my of Gary Becker's paper[1] which notes "demand by a typical consumer is positively related to quantities demanded by other consumers" as an explanation of why restaurants don't raise prices when demand is higher than supply (e.g, maintaining inertia for a 'hot' restaurant). In this context, it would appear the more popular someone appears, if only superficially, the more popular he is likely to become.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.unc.edu/~fbaum/teaching/PLSC541_Fall06/Becker%20JPE%201991.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.unc.edu/~fbaum/teaching/PLSC541_Fall06/Becker%20J...</a>
This effect can be observed in the real world, too. For example, ever been to a new restaurant which is almost completely empty? I feel more inclined to go inside if it already has a good amount of patrons if I've never been there before. Or a waiting line outside a club or even an ice-cream truck. More people in line == the illusion of it appearing to be good/interesting/crowd-approved (to an outside observer).
Some people say what's the point of that.<p>Well, assuming the twitter user is brand/product/company, organic followers equal to potential users. And if the fake followers help to get the organic followers (oh this brand has 50k followers, must be something compared to oh just 200 followers, they probably suck), that's profit. I guess conversion rate from twitter follower to paying user is fairly low (just a guess), but still we are talking about $5-20 investment.<p>After some time, you can just remove fake ones from the followers list using API, shouldn't be hard if you saved fake followers IDs somewhere after purchasing. Just like nothing happened :)<p>Of course from moral point of view, that's wrong. I wouldn't do that. But plenty of people would.
Interesting. I find bots start to follow me randomly, and about half of them stop following me after a few days. I suspect that the ones that stop following me are fishing for people to follow them in return. I had been wondering about the other ones, now I suspect they follow random people to look less like bot...
Clearly "follower count" is not a good metric, just like "inbound link count" from the early days of search engines was not a good metric.<p>It's pretty damning these fake followers were able to game Klout's algorithms, since that's what Klout was trying to solve.<p>But "number of followers" is easy for people to understand so people will continue to consider it important.
It's interesting how closely these things are intertwined (Twitter -> Klout -> Bing -> back to Twitter). Buying fake followers seems like a silly ego boost but apparently it does increase exposure.
So the takeaway is that if one wants to stay competitive in the market for twitter follow bots, one should make sure to pay attention to the interconnectedness of ones bot "community". Start now, and avoid being purged as twitter gets smarter banning bots in the future!<p>I wonder how increased activity (in order to appear more normal) among bots will affect twitters overall performance? Will we see something (more) like email, where spam uses disproportionally more resources than legitimate email?
This won't work forever. As the practice gets more popular, Twitter will have increasingly compelling incentives to crack down on it so that its metrics retain value.
Rob Walker wrote a piece for Yahoo Tech this past week about a band that bought Twitter followers + YouTube views for the launch of their debut single, which is largely about those very things.<p><a href="https://www.yahoo.com/tech/one-bands-quest-to-boost-its-openly-fake-fan-base-87816663874.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.yahoo.com/tech/one-bands-quest-to-boost-its-open...</a>
Twitter must recognize patterns associated with bot accounts and purchased followers. Why aren't the bots shut down, or some other penalty imposed upon those accounts which exhibit certain behaviors described in the post?
My 7 year old twitter account has reached the max of 2000 following, so I can no longer subscribe to more users. This has turned me off twitter since it's so annoying finding more interesting users but not being able to subscribe to them.<p>Maybe I should pony up $5 and buy some followers, which apparently increases the limit on following too.
I rest assured that services like this will be worthless when Twitter figures out how to algorithmically distinguish real followers from fake ones. They do publish research in graph theory as applied to social networks, after all.<p>They could even pull a Google and make it a net negative for your profile to have fake followers.
"A higher Klout score put me higher on Bing’s search results."<p>Where is OP getting that from? Enhancing Bing's Knowledge graph result set. yes. Improving ranking. Not so much.
The interesting thing is that the whole purpose of buying followers is then to push oneself up over the constant "noise" of the social-network plattform.
From: <a href="http://www.quora.com/Psychology/What-is-the-coolest-psychology-trick" rel="nofollow">http://www.quora.com/Psychology/What-is-the-coolest-psycholo...</a><p>TLDR: because the majority does one thing, it can influence others;<p>Text without login:<p>This one is very interesting and you can try with your friends/family.<p>There is a theory called Spiral of silence which observes the fact that " one opinion becomes dominant as those who perceive their opinion to be in the minority do not speak up because society threatens individuals with fear of isolation."
When someone perceives his/her opinion as in the minority, he/she tends to omit or even change it. Humans fear social isolation and want to be part of strong groups, those which will win, the majority (even so, in researches there is always 5% of individuals who do not omit or change opinions: they tend to be the opinion leaders).<p>In a macro level, it can influence voting results, laws to be adopted or who's the next president.<p>You can feel the micro level of it by trying this:
01. Invite to go to the movies that friend who is really optimistic about some movie (he/she read good reviews, loved the trailler, liked the director/actors, etc.)
02. Invite other two or three friends and tell them to show disappointment about the movie after the exhibition (regardless of their true opinion about it).
03. After the exhibition, ask your optimistic friend about his/her opinion. He/she will probably say nice things
04. (You and your other friends) Say things like "I was expecting more", "I don't think it was that great", "It could be better", "The negative reviews were right"
05. Watch your friend's reaction
06. If he/she doesn't change his/her opinion right away, ask again for it the day after.<p>He/she will probably start to feel uncomfortable with his/her own opinion and constrained. Maybe he/she will try to convince you (then keep strong, no need to argue back and try not to offend him/her), maybe he/she will just start to agree with you all.
But it's very likely that your friend changes his/her opinion by the day after...<p>...especially if he/she doesn't read/talk about it with anyone else. This is important because the Spiral of Silence is all about perceptions, and not true reality. Your friend must think that the majority didn't like the movie. If he/she finds out you and your tricky friends are minority, he/she can go back to his/her original opinion.<p>And that's the other interesting thing about this theory: sometimes what is perceived as majority is, actually, just a loud minority. Think about it.