
Fake Friends with Real Benefits - ossama
https://medium.com/i-data/fake-friends-with-real-benefits-eec8c4693bd3
======
ryandrake
The crux of the article was presented near the top:

"on social media it is easy to mistake popularity for credibility"

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.

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.

~~~
jacques_chester
Psychologists call it "social proof".

It's why brands say "we're #1 in X", "we're the most popular Y", "more people
buy our product than any other".

It's why sitcoms have laugh tracks.

And I am not confident on "disrupting" human nature. Most "disruptions" follow
the grooves laid out millions of years ago; what changes is the environment,
not the subjects.

~~~
jweir
A slight disruption, or perhaps just coat tail riding. A Russian detergent
company took advantage of Proctor and Gamble advertising. You know the type of
ad: "when compared to an ordinary soap." So the company named their soap
Ordinary and made it look like the soap in the advertisement. Free advertising
thanks to PG.

[http://articles.latimes.com/1999/jul/09/news/mn-54309](http://articles.latimes.com/1999/jul/09/news/mn-54309)

~~~
_nedR
Oblig xkcd :

"[https://xkcd.com/993/>https://xkcd.com/993/"](https://xkcd.com/993/>https://xkcd.com/993/")

------
_greim_
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 _real_ 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.

~~~
michaelochurch
_It 's a prisoner's dilemma degenerating into a tragedy of the commons._

This is how I feel about LinkedIn. I've seen so many losers and fuckups
(people I've worked with who have destroyed teams and companies) with large
numbers of tit-for-tat, glowing recommendations and ridiculous endorsement
counts. I haven't played that game (and have an extremely boring LI profile,
with past employers not listed) and my numbers are embarrassing.

It's more like the "tragedy of the uncommons": bland people fighting to
establish themselves as somehow special or superior, and fucking up everything
for everyone. It just generates noise, and the winners are the people who are
best at making the right kind of noise.

LinkedIn also tricked a generation into giving up one of their most important
professional rights: the right to reinvent themselves. I use it, because the
information is useful, but I feel like the world was a much better place when
professional oversharing wasn't expected. When labor overshares and capital
doesn't change what it does, who should one expect to win?

As far as I'm concerned, I don't have an ethical problem with social proof
arbitrage. Even if I did, that'd just mean losing to others who don't follow
such rules. The main reason I don't do it is that I don't care. I'm apathetic
about "social proof" in general because, in humans, sociality is inversely
proportional to quality. I certainly wouldn't want to work at a job where the
difference between a 2000 and a 6000 follower count mattered.

~~~
brianpgordon
> _I 've seen so many losers and fuckups (people I've worked with who have
> destroyed teams and companies) with large numbers of tit-for-tat, glowing
> recommendations and ridiculous endorsement counts_

I've seen this too, but it's not a new phenomenon. This has always happened
behind closed doors; LinkedIn merely makes it public.

~~~
Yunk
> I've seen this too, but it's not a new phenomenon. This has always happened
> behind closed doors; LinkedIn merely makes it public.

Yep, we had an engineer who spent 40 hours a week going around and building
social connections.. Where did he find the time?

~~~
wildpeaks
Maybe do ask him: he might actually have useful tips on working smarter and
freeing up time by avoiding repetitive or redondant tasks.

~~~
Yunk
Even the engineer who freed up his time by outsourcing had the common decency
to spend his time looking at pictures of kittens..

If managers could account for the hours of utility he stole from others, I
think it would be a separate reason to put him on probation. (I know he was on
probation for his own output since that was the topic of many of his visits to
one of my neighbors who in turn wasted my time complaining about his tedious
visits just as I waste yours now. So ends my postmodern fable.)

~~~
wildpeaks
I was merely responding to the "Where did he find the time?" sentence because
I often hear it from people misunderstanding highly organized engineers, but
obviously I don't know that specific guy so I can't hazard a guess as to his
specific situation, sorry if you felt misunderstood.

~~~
Yunk
I didn't mean to sound overly harsh or upset about it, since I do recognize
there is a spectrum and you need to fall somewhere in the middle if you want
to be able to learn from more than just your own actions and have
opportunities if your current project gets cancelled, etc.

But I think it is an ironic part of social nature that we continue to reward
those who take it too far on the social side of the spectrum (just complaining
about them we seem to make them into a necessary quirk of the place or create
a miscommunication that gets them a new position) while we let a lot of
brilliant people go just because they look like they are on the other side of
the spectrum to people who don't see their quieter exchanges.

------
lifeformed
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.

~~~
barsonme
If you or anyone else wants to view the image easier, here it is:
[https://d262ilb51hltx0.cloudfront.net/fit/t/1400/1120/gradv/...](https://d262ilb51hltx0.cloudfront.net/fit/t/1400/1120/gradv/29/81/55/1*wZ7XrANFmrdOrbzrXfkguw.png)
or imgur mirror:
[http://i.imgur.com/wZvP14e.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/wZvP14e.jpg)

------
gavanwoolery
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.

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).

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): [http://analytics.twitter.com/](http://analytics.twitter.com/)

~~~
reledi
The _Get started_ button on
[http://analytics.twitter.com](http://analytics.twitter.com) is just a link to
the same page. Is the service not available yet?

~~~
gavanwoolery
Hmm...I am not sure, are you currently logged in to Twitter? Not sure what it
displays if you are logged out. When I go there it displays this:

[http://i.imgur.com/XyGYv6H.png](http://i.imgur.com/XyGYv6H.png)

~~~
reledi
No dice. Tried it on a different computer as well. Was signed in both times.
Maybe they're slowly rolling it out so they close registration sometimes.

~~~
alxndr
"in order to get access, be sure to that tweets to your URLs with cards are
showing up with cards. You will need to have at least 10 tweets within a week
for the volume to be noticed and for the analytics dashboard to be turned on.
Once the minimum number of tweets have been found, you should gain access
within 24 hours. Let me know if you have any other questions!"

[https://dev.twitter.com/discussions/25376#comment-57856](https://dev.twitter.com/discussions/25376#comment-57856)

------
skizm
> "on social media it is easy to mistake popularity for credibility"

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.

~~~
nileshtrivedi
"Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow."

------
Pxtl
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.

------
eroo
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.

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.

[1]
[http://www.unc.edu/~fbaum/teaching/PLSC541_Fall06/Becker%20J...](http://www.unc.edu/~fbaum/teaching/PLSC541_Fall06/Becker%20JPE%201991.pdf)

------
moonlighter
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).

------
hyperion2010
Conclusion: if I haven't seen the network graph I know absolutely nothing
about what 'number of followers' actually means.

------
gedrap
Some people say what's the point of that.

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.

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 :)

Of course from moral point of view, that's wrong. I wouldn't do that. But
plenty of people would.

------
dorfsmay
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...

------
tlrobinson
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.

It's pretty damning these fake followers were able to game Klout's algorithms,
since that's what Klout was trying to solve.

But "number of followers" is easy for people to understand so people will
continue to consider it important.

~~~
marmarlade
>> It's pretty damning these fake followers were able to game Klout's
algorithms, since that's what Klout was trying to solve.

Agreed. They must have improved their algorithm since though, surely? The
algorithm at PeerIndex (European Klout competitor) was good at ignoring fake
followers IIRC. See
[https://web.archive.org/web/20130426180937/http://www.kernel...](https://web.archive.org/web/20130426180937/http://www.kernelmag.com/features/report/2709/peerindex-
ceo-buying-twitter-followers/) & [http://blog.peerindex.com/pornfluence-and-
the-world-of-buyin...](http://blog.peerindex.com/pornfluence-and-the-world-of-
buying-followers/) (quite a similar experiment that Gilad conducted)

------
rzimmerman
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.

------
stcredzero
Fake Friends with Real Benefits in the early 20th century: $20,000 for club
membership. Early 21st century: $5 for 4000 fake followers.

------
e12e
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!

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?

------
xiaoma
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.

------
hmmh
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.

[https://www.yahoo.com/tech/one-bands-quest-to-boost-its-
open...](https://www.yahoo.com/tech/one-bands-quest-to-boost-its-openly-fake-
fan-base-87816663874.html)

------
ilamont
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?

~~~
jfoster
It sounds like the bots pose more of a problem to Klout & Bing than they do to
Twitter. Everyone's Twitter feed ("core functionality") still works very well
even in the presence of this type of not, but the same cannot be said of the
effect they might have on the core functionality of Klout and Bing.

------
callmeed
I'd like sources on SEO being a "muti billion dollar industry". Tens/hundreds
of millions, maybe. I doubt multi-billions.

~~~
jonknee
It most certainly is if you count the gains captured with SEO.

~~~
callmeed
That's like saying the CRM market includes all the gains captured from sales
they helped close.

------
0x0
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.

Maybe I should pony up $5 and buy some followers, which apparently increases
the limit on following too.

~~~
Udo
Out of curiosity, what's the value of following 2000+ people on Twitter? I'm
following about 100 and the noise is already _incredibly_ counterproductive.

~~~
withdavidli
Agreed. I was at about 800 following and decided to trim down to 25-30 people.
Unfollowing takes so long on Twitter I had to use 3rd party apps to speed up
the process.

~~~
reledi
Which apps did you use? I have a difficult time unfollowing people. I try to
purge my following list often, but I never make much progress.

~~~
withdavidli
Some that I used: justunfollow, unfollowers, and iunfollow(not sure if I used
this one, looks familiar).

Each cap their fast unfollow feature to about 25 a day. So it took me about a
week to get it down using all the services.

------
rspeer
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.

They could even pull a Google and make it a net negative for your profile to
have fake followers.

------
squiggy22
"A higher Klout score put me higher on Bing’s search results."

Where is OP getting that from? Enhancing Bing's Knowledge graph result set.
yes. Improving ranking. Not so much.

------
wirrbel
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.

------
ttty
From: [http://www.quora.com/Psychology/What-is-the-coolest-
psycholo...](http://www.quora.com/Psychology/What-is-the-coolest-psychology-
trick)

TLDR: because the majority does one thing, it can influence others;

Text without login:

This one is very interesting and you can try with your friends/family.

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).

In a macro level, it can influence voting results, laws to be adopted or who's
the next president.

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.

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...

...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.

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.

------
alxndr
Medium makes it pretty hard to view a chart and its caption at the same time.

------
kordless
tl;dr; guy increases an integer value in a field in a very large database by
doing something the database owners doesn't want him to do.

~~~
yen223
Most people have to work full-time jobs just to increase an integer value in a
very large database.

