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.
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.
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.
I think one of the fascinating things with social proof is that it usually works even when we know we're being manipulated, or dislike the method. E.g. people that dislike laugh tracks still report shows on average as more funny with them than without them.
It was already kinda figured out in the article. Examining the link 'neighborhood' is an effective way to determine spam within a network. The major players in search, social and email use this technique as one of their primary spam filters.
It's also important to understand that in any high stakes game sniffing out the bad actors is always going to be a never ending cat and mouse game, so no one solution will put an end to it.
but detecting spam is really just a way to filter out "legitimate" popularity from "illegitimate" popularity - it's still relying on popularity as a signal for quality.
Google is somewhat good a discerning credibility, IMHO. At least, whenever I search for something I tend to get exactly what I'm looking for without a bunch of spammy links. Of course, this could be because most of the stuff I search for is just on Stack Overflow or Wikipedia. :)
wikihow is awful. Because it is burying useful content with their superfluous garbage.
OTOH StackOverflow employs similar tactics but it is legit and usually useful content.
Should Google discriminate between these two? If, yes based on what criteria? (Remember, wikihow pages look like they're user generated, legit content) Is there any objective criteria?
I personally would like wikihow to take its place in hell, ehm I mean obscurity. Right next to w3schools.
Yeah, but popularity on StackOverflow is related to "does it work for me," a metric that ultimately depends on evaluation by an impartial machine (or a human using their knowledge of the impartial machine to perform the same evaluation). You can't get popular on SO by answering with random snippets from TAOCP.
Or maybe you can and I'm missing a business opportunity. A TAOCP+OraclePropaganda bot sounds like something that might make bags and bags of money.
How do you know the up-votes on a StackOverflow answer were not fake/bots/paid for? How do you know a GitHub starred/watched repository is really useful and not some job applicant's astroturfing campaign to make it look like their code is widely-used?
I disagree, I find surprisingly often, the top one or two voted answers have low quality in many of the types of searches I end up doing on StackOverflow. Ultimately, it ends up being a resonable ranking when you have a smaller set of answers, and a good mod(?) community that's effective at filtering out actual spam.
Sometimes a longstanding answer has so many upvotes that it stays at the top even if it's no longer the best answer. In cases like that, there's usually a comment that explains why that method is no longer preferred and what you should do instead -- sometimes pointing to the better answer. And if no such comment exists, be kind and add it.
The more elementary the question, the more upvotes you get. So your credibility is also dependent on the superficiality of the questions you are answering, even more so I'd say.
An independent service that publicly rates a person's credibility and consistency (maybe other metrics such as honesty or accuracy) objectively into a reputation score. You would start out rating people for free, probably celebrities, prominent politicians, persons of note in scientific fields, journalists, etc. These would have to be thoroughly documented profiles with established public criteria for the scores in 100% transparency. Once you have established a reputation for accuracy you can start to charge other people to have their score calculated and added to the reputation index. Maybe have a public poll for who to profile next and do several for free each month. Basically a ratings agency or better business bureau type system but for individuals who want to be public figures and people of influence. Part of it would be validating the person's real life identity and the online personas that the person uses so that online exchanges (ratings, discussions, reviews, etc.) could potentially be filtered for only validated real individuals if desired.
This is very costly to do. Listen to a political candidate's speech, then try to validate what they are saying on your own. It's incredibly time consuming.
A ratings service that relies on the person being rated to pay results in conflicts of interest. You will also find it hard to have anyone want to pay for anything that might be critical of them.
A service that did this would require a strong guiding mission, because it's cheaper to shill blog spam than to actually dig in and do accurate research while citing sources.
It's a definite flaw, encountered in so many places with varying degrees of danger, obviously some people are going to try and maximise their results by abusing it.
When I think about credibility though it quickly appears to be a bit of a mine-field, highly context dependent. If PG writes an article people are going to attribute a huge amount of weight to it. Obviously he is very credible when it comes to a lot of subjects, but context can tell all.
I'd say if he wrote about how paste engagement rings were going to be the next big thing there'd be one or two embarrassing proposals on Youtube within the month. But if he wrote on why paste jewelry is the next big thing in fashion businesses there is obvious weight (whether or not it's correct) to that opinion. So I'd say matching context with popularity, and figuring out transferability of credibility are where this can be disrupted.
While this sounds like a very plausible argument, and I agreed wholeheartedly at first, I suggest taking a closer look. I doubt many people, when asked, will say that popularity implies credibility. Credibility is not what's driving these people, it's just the popularity, plain and simple. There's a difference.
What people say when asked is not very interesting. How people actually act matters much more. People say a whole lot of things about their own behaviour when asked that has absolutely no relation to reality.
Atleast for twitter we can have a service which can list the fake followers a user has. This can predict fake followers based on some heuristics like following to follower ratio,tweet frequency, reply ratio etc.
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.
> If neither of us refrain, the numbers become increasingly meaningless and we're left with no way to demonstrate our credibility.
I disagree. It simply means that raw follower count is no longer a usable metric to determine credibility.
There's still tons of other signals that could be harvest. Like PageRank, it seems like a better system would understand the value of each follower (instead of just counting followers/links).
Not only that; if neither of us refrain, we're both wasting more and more resources on a meaningless zero-sum game in a feedback loop.
That's the problem I see with political campaigns - they are holes that waste unlimited amount of resources (labour, power, fuel) in a zero-sum game of minor real importance.
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.
> 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.
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.)
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.
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.
Actually, this applies to any sort of endeavor which brushes up against professions.
Case in point: open source. Over the past year, there have been a few articles exhorting the need to put considerable amounts of time marketing your open source project. Remember, it's not enough to release your code with decent docs, no, you have to buy a domain, put together a flat-themed bootstrap teaser page, make grandiose claims, blog regularly about it, set up a Twitter account, and so on.
Why didn't we feel the need to do all of this the decade before? Oh, right: we weren't all ubiquitously self-promoting to each other via social.
Worker harder, peon! Prove your worth to the world, which might reward you with more influence that you can eventually exchange for a job at $MEGACORP! Then you'll have made it!
> glowing recommendations and ridiculous endorsement counts
I don't know anyone that takes these seriously as a signal for hiring someone. You just do what you usually do -- call people you know that have worked with them before to get the scoop. But I don't blame LinkedIn for building and promoting these features. They're like Facebook Pokes -- light touch interactions that promote engagement with connections, and revisits back to the site. Anecdotal observations suggest that they work.
You just do what you usually do -- call people you know that have worked with them before to get the scoop.
That's even worse. Back-channel references are unreliable and if you ding someone on a back-channel, you better hope it's not someone like me who will litigate just to show the world the right.
I can't imagine a scenario where I wouldn't do a number of them for a key hire. Hiring managers is very hard. It's important that you make sure it's a good fit. Back-channel references are one really strong way to help make sure it's a great fit for both people. And usually, references help to surface some of the persons' strengths you might not really have known, as well as some blind spots you can code your behavior around.
Back-channel references are one of those things that seems like a great idea but they quietly cause a world of problems.
Long term they create highly insular organisations that overpay for lower levels of talent. Worse, they tend to quickly be gamed by the type of people who tend to be vary good at getting promoted without actually being competent.
People invent "social proof" schemes like back-channel references because they think they'll guard them against unethical people, but they do the reverse. You end up getting more smooth operator types (who can game any social proof system set up against them) and rejecting normal people.
Now, I agree that unethical people do an incredible amount of damage and that you want to do everything you can to avoid hiring them. However, the data is extremely clear that once you're beyond 3 or 4 references, you're actually selecting for unethical behavior. If someone has 10 glowing references covering the past 5 years, he probably extorted his way into that. I've done my fair of "fixer" work (nothing unethical) and had a unique view into the ethical underbelly of the corporate world, and I see that shit all the time.
If someone passes an intensive back-channel reference check, it's because he's scared the living shit out of people. Do you really want that kind of toxicity in your company?
I think it's very hard to identify quality of people based on recommendations on LinkedIn. Having a well written (not too verbose, and gives a view of who you are) LinkedIn profile does send a signal - that you want people to have information about you.
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.
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/
"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!"
> "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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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...
Yeah, a follower count is a bad metric because it completely ignores the quality of a follower. Compare a high profile, well known, respected and talented person who has contributed a lot as a follower, as well as a bot who signed up a week ago and has no meaningful contributions.
Each follower counts for 1 in the total follower count.
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!
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.
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?
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.
Because that's not as simple as you make it out to be, the bot creators will just make the bots look more real, then you create an even bigger problem. Bots that function like real accounts. It wouldn't be hard to do at all it would just take some time.
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.
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.
I don't read it all, but when i do open the twitter app, i like that it's all new content for as long as i can be bothered to scroll. And there are lots of interesting people out there.
edit: and 2000 users over 7 years is less than one new per day.
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.
I had made a twitter account a long while ago but didn't really use it. A month or two ago I decided I wanted to start using it again but I had somehow started following 2000 people. I couldn't find a 3rd party app for unfollowing that didn't have me sign up for something so I used document.getElementByClassName(unfollowButtonString) to click all the unfollow buttons at once. Regardless of that hassle, finding and using inactive accounts is probably pretty easy for the people selling these follows. I imagine they just try passwords leaked from other services or applications or hire people to make fake accounts.
I was going to say the same thing. I've got about 50 followers and sometimes it's all I can do to not unsubscribe from half of them. I'd bet that getting to 100 is much harder to handle, and I can't even imagine 2000...
I recommend using lists. I'm not sure if there's a limit on the number of people you can add to a list but I haven't hit one yet. I typically follow only friends and people who I find particularly interesting but I put lots of other people on lists. The other benefit of twitter lists is you can divide accounts by categories. For instance I have a list called hackers that is only programmers, and a list that is only designers, etc. I find lists can give useful context to twitter and help pull some signal out of the noise.
That's interesting. Unfortunately the UI is all about "follow @user" buttons, lists not so much. I'm guessing browsing list feeds aren't as prominent in the mobile apps either, but I haven't tried yet.
Anyway the user hostile error messages I got when I tried to add following user #2001 - instead of a suggestion like yours, perhaps - made me lose interest in the whole thing.
The UX makes it pretty easy to add users to lists. You click on the gear next to the follow button then click Add/Remove from lists. And I'm pretty sure it's present in the mobile app as well.
Looks like it's there in the main mobile app. But what about embeddable widgets on websites? And now i need multiple taps to add a follower. And will it show "added to your list" status like it shows "following"?
Too much effort. Plus, it seems twitter thinks I'm using their service in the wrong way. If the way I like to use it is wrong, I guess it's better to just stay away, makes everyone happier.
My problem with Twitter lists is that they're so hidden that I never browse them. They're not as prominent as your normal feed, which is front and centre.
To get round this problem I use TweetDeck, which allows you to have more than one column on display. I've only tried the desktop version and haven't tried any similar mobile apps though.
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.
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.
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.
"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.