Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by camus2 3066 days ago
> Think about it--if a user receives a bunch of fake friend requests, it's a bad experience.

Except that Facebook knows who is real and who fake. Just like my mail provider knows who sends spam and who doesn't.

Facebook can display ads to fake users and still make the campaigner pay for the impression, or make a group pay for reaching more users, fakes included.

Facebook can easily filter requests from fake profiles, so no, fake users do not necessary worsen the experience for real ones.
1 comments
yourdonut 3066 days ago
"Facebook can easily filter requests from fake profiles" "Except that Facebook knows who is real and who fake."

You say that so definitively. Have you worked on a product with millions of new users a week? It's an extremely hard, constantly shifting problem.

"Facebook can display ads to fake users and still make the campaigner pay for the impression"

Facebook's entire business relies on user and advertise trust. Why would they sacrifice that for some short term growth that would inevitably kill the business by eroding trust?

link
shostack 3066 days ago
While I don't pretend to have been party to internal FB conversations when certain decisions were made, as an advertiser, FB has definitely done some things to significantly erode that trust over the years.

For starters, encouraging advertisers to spend money to build up an audience with the assumption they could continue reaching that audience much like email, only to throttle organic reach to zero was pretty bad.

There have been other things such as being extremely...generous...with the definitions of how some ad metrics are defined and what defaults are presented. Even as an experienced advertiser who knows to look for those things, the lengths to which some of it it is buried is astounding to the point of it being hard to trust that it wasn't intentional. And the recent lawsuits around such things shows I'm not alone in that feeling.

link
camus2 3066 days ago
> You say that so definitively. Have you worked on a product with millions of new users a week? It's an extremely hard, constantly shifting problem.

Facebook has hundreds of engineers and enough data to do match patterns against. Facebook can largely identify who's who.

> Facebook's entire business relies on user and advertise trust. Why would they sacrifice that for some short term growth that would inevitably kill the business by eroding trust?

Yes, the infamous "they trust me, dumb fucks"?

link
yourdonut 3066 days ago
"Facebook has hundreds of engineers and enough data to do match patterns against. Facebook can largely identify who's who." I know, I used to work there. I was asking you. Pattern matching isn't black-and-white, as you alluded to in your previous comment.

"Yes, the infamous 'they trust me, dumb fucks'?" You didn't do or say stupid things when you were 19? You don't believe in giving second chances, let alone to a teenager?

link