
Click farms: a shadowy internet industry is booming in China - smaili
https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/click-farms-internet-china-154440209.html
======
wpietri
There was a reply here, now dead, that I wanted to discuss:

"Hey man, I'm just trying to feed my family. I have kids so that means I can
behave however I want so long as it benefits my kids. And rather than trust
some reviews on a platform anyone can sign up for, how about you do some
reading on the app developer and their ToS and Privacy Policy."

I'm adamantly opposed to spam, and back in the early days of the web (say,
1996 or so) I'd call up spammers and politely ask them to stop. Quite a number
of people were just confused or oblivious; they would often take my
suggestions to heart. But a lot of them were in some sort of scarcity panic
like this guy is. They had bills to pay, mouths to feed! If what they did
harmed other people, well, they weren't going to think too hard about that.

One of the real tragedies of this is how circular it is, how self-sustaining.
Why is this person so desperate? Often it's because a) other desperate people
are doing shitty things to them, or b) entirely non-desperate people have
rigged things so that there are enough desperate people harnessed to make sure
those on top get and stay rich.

We can divide all economic activity into value creation and wealth extraction.
Things like click farming do extract wealth, but they increase systemic waste,
meaning less value can be produced. That in turn increases the amount of
desperation, making people more likely to join them in doing something
exploitative just to survive.

It all seems so pathological. I wish we were better at breaking these cycles.

~~~
dmix
You had me until the part you suggested there was some subset of the upper
class conspiring to keep an underclass of poor people... in order to make/keep
themselves rich?Wouldn't rich people get much richer if there was _more_
economically healthy middle class people buying their products and real estate
or w/e they are making money off of?

What could they possibly gain from ruining the economy and keeping others
poor. This seems to be based on a very poor understanding of how economics
works, or the idea that there are secret nation-wide power systems plotting
evil things like a rich villain in a Disney movie.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
The extremely rich do in fact conspire to keep wages low and economic security
precarious, for both political and economic reasons.

There's plenty of historical evidence for this. For example:
[https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2007/aug/28/commen...](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2007/aug/28/comment.businesscomment)

The counterargument is that the massive increases in wealth inequality since
the 50s - a time when the average single wage earner could afford a relatively
secure lifestyle - "just happened", which is obviously rather implausible.

~~~
arethuza
_" There's class warfare, all right, but it's my class, the rich class, that's
making war, and we're winning."_

Warren Buffet

~~~
1PlayerOne
make total sense, I mean who has the time and money to organize for a class
war. What is surprising is that a lot of the stupid poor are fighting on side
of the rich people who are keeping them poor. Sad!

------
Trias11
That's how they perpetuate "Made in China"===(Fake|Crap)

I was wondering why is obscure, crappy apps in apple store get so many
positive reviews.

Apple/AMZN need to up their game in reviews/ratings domains.

~~~
mrep
App stores are also used for money laundering. Create a bogus app, spend a
bunch of money "buying" your app and now you have "legitimate" money.

~~~
neurostimulant
Is 30% cut by Apple/Google actually competitive compared to other money
laundering methods?

~~~
mrep
I'm sort of guessing here based on movies/things I have read since I ain't no
money launderer, but I think locality to the source of money makes a huge
difference. If you are a local drug dealer who makes all their money in their
local currency in cash, then it is probably most efficient to open up some
local business like a dry cleaner (i believe that's what one of the
"businesses" they had in the movie american gangster) which "happens to make a
bunch of money through pseudonymous cash". That way, you would only have to
pay sales tax.

If you are selling to people outside your main currency though, you need
someway to convert it back and "digital" transactions seem ideal so I can see
the extra cost being worth it (you just happen to have a lot of american
customers who like your digital product...)

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bctnry
It's not "booming", not in the sense of "it just got big all of a sudden"; it
is big, and it has been there (and big) for a very, very long time.

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baybal2
Clickfarming used to be a big business in Russia around early 200x.

It was de-facto the only "Internet business" at the time, and, I admit, my
first introduction to making money in the Internet.

All other things that got Russia its later fame like the huge carding scene,
industrial scale spam ops, and such evolved out of it.

Ironically, out of all of that, the warez scene died out first, due to its own
success. When people were getting their first fibre/dedicated copper Internet
connections, people stopped paying even the measly $3 for warez copies on
physical CDs.

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zkid18
I think the roots of fake engagement are coming from our perception of key
success metrics for content creators. I don't blame those people - advertisers
and services are more in charge of that behavior. We tend to think that likes
and views are the key signs of content quality or popularity.

By the way, WeChat has a really nice way to cope with fake likes. For official
accounts they hide the total number of subscribers, leaving only the number of
friends that read this account. Instagram is hiding the number of likes on
posts in several countries as well, in order to "remove pressure" on users.

I think that is on of the ways for healthier content ecosystem.

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RickJWagner
If there's a way to score, it's a game.

If there's a game, there's a gamer.

People are gonna play the game. (In this case, winning the click counts.)

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princeb
i wonder if there will be a possibility in the future where the OS runs app
telemetry, looks at things like how long a user spends on an app, parts of the
app that the user clicks on, looks at, the text and non-text elements of the
app, and then applies a statistical model to determine quality and hence
rating of the app. that could obviate the need for "human rating" which is
inherently gamable.

~~~
est
We run hundreds of pipelines like this to fight against click-farms and spam
bots....

.... and censorship for the government.

The secret weapon is Heap Analytics, which allows define data points
collection on the fly without recompile the app and republish with hard-coded
predefined event hooks.

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danielscrubs
You get what you measure.

Now that I think about it, VISA and Mastercard are probably in a very good
position to be some kind of trusted ad-middleman.

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nickthemagicman
I've always wondered a software simulator wouldn't work? Like a bunch of phone
VMs behind a proxy.

~~~
anonymous5133
Let's just say you're not the first one to think of that "bright" idea. People
running on VM and behind a proxy are easy to detect so you don't get paid for
it.

~~~
nickthemagicman
Right. Not saying I am. Just looking for why.

I mean at an even lower level why can't the packets sent to the app store be
collected analyzed and then forged.

Just don't understand why.

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nrki
Auto-playing videos need to die.

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skunkpocalypse
> I'm curious

No you're not curious. You're sarcastic. And a wanker.

~~~
dang
We've banned this account for breaking the site guidelines and posting
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eventually gets your main account banned as well.

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