2veritasium
3 HN recommenders · recommended in 10 months, 2014–2018
6:59 · 3.1M views · Jan 14, 2014
Veritasium's Derek Muller argues that Facebook's business model works against pages and creators, because it charges them to reach the audiences they built. He explains how filtering and paid promotion undermine the value of likes.
HN commenters recommend it, with its follow-up, as an exposé of fake likes and bot activity, and as a warning before spending on Facebook ads.
13 comments from Hacker News
for those interested in this topic these two excellent videos from veritasium corroborate this article and go beyond to explain the stark implications for facebook's business model: facebook fraud: [LINK] the problem with facebook: this video > From January 2013 to February 2014, a global team of researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems, Microsoft’s and AT&T’s research labs, as well as Boston and Northeastern Universities, conducted an experiment designed to determine just how often advertising campaigns resulted in likes from fake profiles. The researchers ran ten Facebook advertising campaigns, and when they analyzed the likes resulting from those campaigns, they found that 1,867 of the 2,767 likes—or about 67 percent—appeared to be illegitimate. After being informed of these suspicions, Facebook corroborated much of the team’s work by erasing 1,730 of the likes. Sympathetic researchers from a study run by the online marketing website Search Engine Journal have suggested that targeted Facebook advertisements can yield suspicious likes at a rate above 50 percent. In the fall of 2014, Professor Emiliano De Cristofaro of the University College of London presented research which found that even a page explicitly labeled as fake gained followers—the vast majority presumably bots. > The bot buildup can even affect companies that aren’t advertising with Facebook, but are just passively hoping their pages gain real fans. In 2014, Harvard University’s Facebook fan
If you haven't yet watched Derek's earlier video about "the problem with facebook", you should: this video because in it he lays bare several fundamental structural issues about facebook which 99% people don't realize. Well worth the watch. Unless fb changes drastically, it will die a surprisingly fast death.
for a fantastic expose of how facebook is riddled with fraud and bots, check out veritasium's two videos: facebook fraud [LINK] the problem with facebook this video
facebook ads are junk and have been proven to be so before you waste any money, watch these two videos: [LINK] this video
Veritasium on youtube has a couple of videos breaking down the numbers - not only do you have to pay to get views now, but the views delivered above and beyond what you usually get are fraudulent. He showed the usage of his page beforehand, with users clustered in Western countries, generally 20-40% of whom interacted with his page in some way. After paying for more views, they were all from developing countries, a profile of users he'd never seen before with very little (0-1%) engagement with his page. It's worth checking out his videos if you want more detail on the patterns he found. It's pretty clear that it's fraudulent. this video (explores problems he sees with FB as a marketing platform) [LINK] (massive influx of unengaged developing-world pageviews)