
Getting Beaten By A Voting Bot In 50 Minutes - ericd
http://blog.padmapper.com/2012/04/30/voting-bot/
======
martey
On Apartment List's blog, they are claiming that they asked voters to forward
their confirmation emails to them, so that they could confirm votes right
before the voting ended: [http://blog.apartmentlist.com/the-2012-peoples-
choice-webby-...](http://blog.apartmentlist.com/the-2012-peoples-choice-webby-
awards-postmortem/)

Based on the dating, it looks like it was posted _before_ this PadMapper post.

~~~
Cushman
Agreed that sounds like bullshit, but assuming they _did_ in fact plan to win
the vote in a way which _looks_ exactly like cheating but which turns out to
be unorthodox but legitimate, we've got an early contender for marketing
gambit of the year.

~~~
ericd
Heh yeah, I would be pretty impressed if it was legit. The main problem would
be getting a large number of people to remember and agree to jump through
those hoops instead of just confirming it when they got it. Pretty
interesting.

~~~
polemic
Seems to me you'd lose too many people to "Just Too Hard" syndrome for the
strategy to be worth using too.

------
MehdiEG
Welcome to the wonderful world of awards. As you'll find out pretty quickly if
you keep going for awards, what happened to you here is nothing more than
business as usual. The immense majority of awards out there are 100% bullshit
and completely meaningless.

The ones that rely on public votes are very obviously always worthless but the
ones relying on a judging panel are, in their vast majority, just as
meaningless.

This is actually why entering awards is a great strategy for cash-poor
startups who can't afford to pay a PR person. Anybody can win awards. In fact,
I haven't personally tried that strategy, but I'm certain that you don't even
need to have a product, or a business at all, to win awards. Put together a
pretty looking web page for a non-existent product, write a convincing enough
description, enter a few random awards and, soon-enough, you should be the
proud owner of an award-winning non-existent product.

There are two reasons why it's worth spending a few minutes from time to time
entering awards as a startup:

\- Many people don't understand how awards work and believe that they actually
mean something (well, they do mean something: that you're better at winning
awards than your competitors). So having an award-winning product does
increase your credibility with clients.

\- More importantly though, the reason people organise awards is generally to
generate PR for themselves. So they'll generally have a PR company lined up to
make sure that the award gets covered in the media. Which in turns means that
the winners get free PR. And that, for a startup, is priceless.

------
andrewfelix
If you visit the Youtube link posted on the Ap. List blog post
([http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qY9dAhsWZg&feature=playe...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qY9dAhsWZg&feature=player_embedded))
You'll notice a lot of posts saying they were sent by Ty Moss, Kenny Powers
etc. I'm assuming these were sponsored plugs and might have effected the
outcome(?). But you'll also notice in the youtube description a link to this
page: <http://www.aTrueUnderdog.com> which in turn points to this page >
<http://www.organizer.org/webby9.htm> which in turn points to the webby
ballot. WTF is going on there and who is <http://www.organizer.org>?

EDIT: Apparently the domain belongs to Denis Grosz (<http://grosz.com/about>)
who is on the Ap. List team...<http://blog.apartmentlist.com/about/>

EDIT #2: I just had a thought...Grosz may be attempting to increase clicks
through the organizer url to make it appear more valuable.

~~~
ricardobeat
Well noted, though it doesn't seem malicious unless the url
<http://pv.webbyawards.com/ballot/46> casts a vote directly (can't check since
it's offline).

~~~
andrewfelix
No that link wouldn't have voted directly. It would have been the index link
for that particular award category. I agree it doesn't appear malicious, just
odd.

------
ChuckMcM
Well looking at Mechanical Turk [1] it seems that Twitter manipulation comes
in at about 5 cents a 'hit' so if a Webby was worth $25,000 to you, you could
buy half a million votes. I was wondering if you could go 'back in time' but
couldn't find that, to see if there was anything like this in it.

That being said, there are lots and lots of bots on Twitter [2]and given how
easy it is to program one, and the fact that folks might pay for it, wouldn't
you like to have a 'twitter army' in your pocket that for the right price
could give you a shout out? Heck people do it with zombie PCs all the time.

[1]
[https://www.mturk.com/mturk/viewsearchbar?searchWords=twitte...](https://www.mturk.com/mturk/viewsearchbar?searchWords=twitter&selectedSearchType=hitgroups&sortType=LatestExpiration%3A0&pageNumber=2&searchSpec=HITGroupSearch%23T%231%2310%23-1%23T%23!keyword_list!2!rO0ABXQAB3R3aXR0ZXI-!Reward!6!rO0ABXQABDAuMDA-!%23!LatestExpiration!0!%23)!

[2] <http://www.sysomos.com/insidetwitter/mostactiveusers/>

~~~
spinlock
but, why wait until the last minutes? when I cheat ... I mean, if I were going
to cheat, I'd want to make it look good. So, I would spread the votes out over
a longer period.

~~~
ChuckMcM
That is a great question. One could speculate, last minute idea "Hey this is
close enough, I bet we could win it with ..." or a feint of obviousness, or
any number of things.

The OP speculates a voting robot, however if you did it with Mechanical Turk
which uses real people you might find that they procrastinate and only pick up
tasks that are about to go off the lists or something. That would be
especially true if price per hit went up as it approached the deadline, one
could arbitrage the value vs the number of hits you could do in time to meet
the deadline.

~~~
ericd
Yeah, I added MTurk as a possible explanation in one of my edits before
putting up the post. It would be a more expensive, but harder to trace way to
do the same thing - MTurk is effectively a human bot. One giveaway would be
that most of those IPs are likely to come from outside the US, and since most
of these sites only serve US (and Canada/UK in the case of PM), it'd be easy
to tell that something was off if you knew that fact.

------
dkokelley
How confident can you be that voting percentages found through a neat hack can
be reliable? If the percentages were taken down, the Webby admins could have
been doing anything during that period, under the assumption that those
percentages wouldn't be seen (and therefor didn't need to be accurate).

Here's an alternate explanation to the events observed: The Webby admins
started removing what they considered to be fraudulent votes during the
blackout period. Most of these removed votes came from PadMapper and Zillow,
which increased (linearly) Apartment List's percentage.

Full disclosure: I have no dog in this fight. I haven't used any of the
services mentioned, and I've only really heard of Zillow.

~~~
ericd
Yeah, that's possible too. I ruled that out because they weren't going to
announce for 5 days, so they'd have time to analyze/tweak the data after the
voting was finished, rather than messing with the live data. Their tweak just
removed a bit of data from the page, doubtful it was significantly different
logic-wise. Even if Zillow and PadMapper were doing nefarious things, it's
unlikely that they would have the same proportion of fraudulent votes while AL
had far less, though - that would require coordination between PM and Zillow
or some outside factor that would cause us to naturally cheat the same amount.

------
unfletch
Since you obviously wanted to win, sorry you got cheated, but at this point I
think the only people who pay any attention to the Webbys are those who've
paid to be "nominated."

~~~
wpietri
Does anybody know how much the Webby folks charge for a nomination?

~~~
ericd
Haha I don't think you can buy a full nom, but if memory serves they charge
either 200 or 300 as an entry fee per category. I think they get ballpark 10k
entries for roughly 100 categories, and make 5*category# noms.

~~~
ricardobeat
They make $2 million from entries only?

~~~
unfletch
Slate thinks so, as of 2008:

    
    
      Even after allowing for discounted entry fees, the back of
      the envelope says the Webbys could be taking in more than
      $2 million from its contestants.
    

[http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/press_box/20...](http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/press_box/2008/04/what_youve_not_been_honored_by_the_webbys.html)

------
HairyMezican
So ApartmentsList knew they were going to cheat at the end, so they have one
bot do everything required to vote, and towards the end, and then later have
another bot go through and confirm addresses. And since they know they're
going to be called out on their shit, they post a blog post telling everybody
to forward the confirmations.

There's no way theyd be able to get a significant number of people to not only
go vote, but then forward a registration email

~~~
mratzloff
Of course there's a way: if there were specific instructions on oDesk, and
they paid per vote.

Here is an example: [https://www.odesk.com/jobs/hours-facebook-
votes_%7E%7Ef07c72...](https://www.odesk.com/jobs/hours-facebook-
votes_%7E%7Ef07c728ee23ae5da?tot=2187&pos=21)

Of course, any of these could easily be them; there are hundreds of anonymous
posts paying for votes. It's so easy and common to scam online votes that it
happens all the time.

------
DanBC
Honestly - no-one pays any attention to awards.

([http://successfulsoftware.net/2007/08/16/the-software-
awards...](http://successfulsoftware.net/2007/08/16/the-software-awards-
scam/))

([http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2007/aug/23/guardianwee...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2007/aug/23/guardianweeklytechnologysection.it3))

~~~
roel_v
Those two just say that it's easy to get fake awards. That's completely
orthogonal to how much (if any) attention people pay to them.

------
anigbrowl
Internet opinion polls are a complete waste of time. Imagine if you had spent
the time wasted on this on developing a new feature or marketing copy. Things
like the Webby awards are a way designed to separate you from the dollars in
your marketing budget by pandering to your ego. The general public absolutely
does not care, any more than you care about the Daytime TV Emmy awards (yes,
such things exist).

~~~
ericd
Even if you don't care, I think the media does. The cost of entry was pretty
low, though (200 or 300, I think) - certainly a lot less than any ad buy. And
you get some great ego stroking if you win as a bonus :-)

------
eps
Webbys? Why do you care about winning it? This is a joke of an award that
doesn't mean anything at all.

~~~
ericd
An excuse to visit friends in NYC?

------
andrewfelix
Apartment List just 'elaborated': <http://blog.apartmentlist.com/webby-
strategy-elaborated/>

Note the distorted use of page view statistics to help put the explanation in
context. If you have a look at Alexa you'll see padmapper gets substantially
more traffic than Apartment List.

For the record I don't think they've used a bot, but I do think they've used
outside(paid) help to generate votes.

~~~
huckleberries21
Seems that it would be easy enough to get some voters to corroborate their
claim (maybe some screenshots) rather than offer this non-proof elaboration?

------
zackzackzack
A semi-related question: Isn't padmapper using a bot to scrape websites? Isn't
it mapping craigslist, which specifically says, please don't scrape us, we
don't want that?

Just wondering out loud some.

~~~
ricardobeat
> please don't scrape us, we don't want that

Those are still murky waters. Copyright law allows the compilation of a third-
party's data as long as you are creating something original with it.

~~~
eli
Just because something is legal, doesn't necessarily make it a nice thing to
do.

------
jakejake
Hopefully this will get some attention and they'll do some checking to get rid
of fraud votes.

------
deepkut
Your article has a HN counter next to the Facebook "Like," and Tweet buttons--
where did you grab that from?

~~~
civilian
If you look at the html you will find a url to hnbutton.appspot.com, and if
you hit it without any parameters you will get forwarded to:

<https://github.com/igrigorik/hackernews-button>

~~~
ericd
Good detective work! Saved me from having to look up the URL :-)

------
metafour
So basically AL is claiming they did a mass voting snipe?

Seems a bit disingenuous but then again Ebay bidding seems to have been this
way for a while and now the strategy is moving to other areas if this is the
case.

------
mthreat
As is often the case with these awards, the only winner is the site running
the contest. Other players in the game have incentive to send traffic to the
site running the contest, who gets more traffic. Meanwhile, the sites being
voted on spend lots of time trying to win, and in turn asking their users to
spend their time voting.

