
The elaborate scam of automated bookmark spam - aaronbrethorst
http://blog.del.icio.us/?p=1225
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joshu
God. I did the majority of anti-spam stuff for delicious, which at times
reached 50% of the total volume. Zero support or staffing from my management,
too.

------
smacktoward
The amazing thing here is that this whole miniature economy was resting on a
premise that _absolutely could not work_ , since the bookmarked links were
getting marked as nofollow and were therefore 100% useless for the purpose of
generating Google-juice.

From the reproduced ads, it looks like at least some of the sellers of
spamming services explicitly marketed the resulting links as "dofollow" \--
i.e. not having the nofollow attribute applied. But that's an assertion that
even the simplest fact-checking would have knocked flat, so you have to assume
that the only people who would buy the service are people who are either too
clueless or too dumb to investigate whether it actually did what it claimed to
do before buying it.

(Which is a testament to just how many clueless and dumb people there are
running around out there, I guess.)

~~~
thephyber
> Which is a testament to just how many clueless and dumb people there are
> running around

This is snake oil. It's not the first and it certainly won't be the last case
of it.

It's the same premise that powers sales of lots of products from

    
    
      * "holistic" / non-FDA-approved medicines: {"male enhancement", hair regrowth, weight loss, anti-aging, muscle-building} drugs
      * fortune telling
      * "get rich quick" schemes
      * multi-level marketing promises of success
    

You are sold an emotional appeal of wealth / health / success / sex /
whatever. If it triggers your emotions, your lizard brain takes over and your
cognition takes a back seat. Everyone at some point with the right appeals,
will fall victim to the right sales pitch. Addictive personalities and those
with "blind faith" tend to be the first to be sold and extreme skeptics tend
to be the last, but they are all weaknesses in human behavior.

It's not very far from the same basic sales techniques used in spear-phishing.

